Joan Plowright – a leading actress in British theatre’s post-war class revolution

By Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Queen Mary University of London

Dame Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, was an actress of enormous and wide-ranging talent across a 60-year stage and screen career. Plowright was “perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century”, in Variety’s words. She was certainly a leading pioneer in post-war British theatre’s modernisation – particularly in terms of her theatrical style, as well as her geographic and class origins.

Raised in a middle-class family in Scunthorpe, northern…

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