British actress Joan Plowright, Tony Award winner and widow of actor Laurence Olivier, has died at the age of 95.

Award-winning British actress Joan Plowright, who did so much with her late husband Laurence Olivier to revitalize the UK theater scene in the decades after World War II, has died. It was 95.

Plowright died the day before at Denville Hall, a nursing home for actors in southern England, surrounded by loved ones, her family said in a statement on Friday.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career in theatre, film and television over seven decades until blindness forced her retirement,” the family said. “We are so proud of everything Joan did and who she was as a very loving and inclusive person.”

Part of an amazing generation of British actors, incl judi dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie SmithPlowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and Academy Award and Emmy nominations. Queen Elizabeth II granted her the title of Dame in 2004.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Plowright performed dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” She dazzled in Eugène Ionesco’s “Chairs” and in George Bernard Shaw’s two female roles, “Major Barbara” and “Saint Joan.”

“I’ve been very privileged to have such a life,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview. Actor’s work. “I mean it’s magic and I still feel, when the curtain goes up or the lights come on if there’s no curtain, the magic of the beginning of what’s going to unfold before me.”

The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident from news of theaters all over the world West end The lights will be turned off for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday in her honour.

Born Joan Anne Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur drama group and Plowright was involved in theater from the age of three. Soon she was spending school vacations attending university drama school summer courses. After high school, she studied at Laban Art Movement Studio in Manchester, then won a two-year scholarship to drama school at the Old Vic Theater in London.

After making her stage debut in London in 1954, Plowright became a member of the Royal Court Theater in 1956 and gained fame in dramas written by the so-called Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne, who were giving British theater a mass airplay. New working class representatives, such as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins, were her peers.

Plowright made her feature film debut with an uncredited role in American director John Huston’s epic adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1956, starring Gregory Peck as the maniacal Captain Ahab.

A year later, she starred with her future husband Olivier in the original production of Osborne’s The Entertainer in London. She played Olivier’s daughter in the work and they were reunited in the 1960 film adaptation.

By then, Plowright’s marriage to British actor Roger Cage had ended, as had Olivier’s 20-year marriage to Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier married in Connecticut in 1961, while they were starring on Broadway, he in “Beckett” and she in “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony Award.

One of Olivier’s love letters summed up his love: “I sometimes feel a peace overwhelm me when I think of you, or write to you—a gentle tenderness and serenity. A feeling free from all violence, passion, or broken longing… that makes me go out into the street with a smile on my face and in my heart for everyone.”

Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. Plowright subsequently enjoyed a resurgence in his career at the age of 60, pleasing refined tastes and more commercial prices.

She was in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” in 1996 and the Merchant-Ivory production of “Surviving Picasso,” as well as starring as the tough-as-nails governess in the live-action remake of Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” in 1996 with Glenn. Closes.

She starred opposite Walter Matthau in the big-screen comedy classic “Dennis the Menace,” and appeared briefly in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1993 satire “Last Action Hero.”

Plowright became one of the few actors to win two Golden Globe Awards in the same year, in 1993, when she won the TV Supporting Actress Award for “Stalin” and the Motion Picture Supporting Actress Award for “Enchanted April.” As for the latter film, which tells the story of a group of Britons who find their lives changed during a vacation in Italy, it received its only Oscar nomination.

Not all of her work has been career roses, as with the disastrous “The Scarlet Letter” starring Demi Moore and a pilot that went nowhere for a TV series based on “Driving Miss Daisy.” His appearance alongside Chevy Chase in the 2011 family comedy “Goose on the Loose” did not excite critics.

One prominent role in her later life was as keeper of the Olivier flame – giving awards, defending her husband in the press, and coordinating his communications.

“That’s my choice because I’ve had the privilege of living with him,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2003. “When someone who had such fame and such idolatry and worship goes away, there’s bound to be a backlash coming the other way and I’m a bit tired of that,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2003. “I was really trying to put things right.”

Plowright is survived by her three children – Tamsin, Richard and Julie Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.