The actor Joan Plowright, who was celebrated for her long career in theatre and film, has died at the age of 95, her family have announced.

Plowright won acclaim for performances during the early years of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and the National Theatre when it was based at the Old Vic and led by her second husband, Laurence Olivier.

She and Olivier appeared together in the West End and on Broadway in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, as well as starring in the screen version. At the National, she played Portia to Olivier’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice as well as roles including Masha in Three Sisters, Sonya in Uncle Vanya and the eponymous heroine of Shaw’s Saint Joan.

A statement from her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on 16 January 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire.

“She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family are deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.”

The Society of London Theatre announced that playhouses across London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes in remembrance at 7pm on Tuesday. The organisation’s co-CEO, Hannah Essex, said: “Dame Joan Plowright was an iconic and deeply respected figure in the world of theatre, leaving an indelible mark on the industry she shaped with her talent and dedication.”

The US film director Paul Feig was among those paying tribute. He said that working with Plowright on his first feature film, I Am David (2003), had been an “unbelievable” honour. “I was in over my head directing such a legend but she made it all so easy,” he said in a post on X. “I marvelled at every take she did and learned so much from her.”

Plowright was born on 28 October 1929 in Brigg, Lincolnshire, and attended Scunthorpe grammar school on a scholarship. She was the second of three children of Daisy Margaret Burton and William Ernest Plowright. Her mother was an amateur actor and opera singer who taught dancing; her father was a journalist with a passion for am-dram. She always wanted to be an actor and won a drama trophy at a local theatre festival aged 15. After leaving school at 17 she worked briefly as a supply teacher before training at the Old Vic theatre school in London.

After appearing in a late-night revue in London she made her stage debut in 1948 in Croydon in a show called If Four Walls Told and then joined the Old Vic theatre company, where she met the actor Roger Gage, whom she later married. She auditioned unsuccessfully to play Bianca in Orson Welles’s stage production of Othello. Welles remembered her and cast Plowright as Pip the cabin boy in his West End version of Moby Dick in 1955.

The following year, arriving at George Devine’s English Stage Company, she “felt for the first time totally at home in a theatre” as she wrote in her memoir And That’s Not All. “I was in touch with people who cared, as I cared, about creating a theatre which was to do with the 20th century. I found my own voice as an actress, and an exhilarating sense of purpose.” William Wycherley’s The Country Wife was her first success at the Royal Court and, over several years, she starred in plays as diverse as Arnold Wesker’s Roots, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (in the title role) and Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs and The Lesson, which both transferred to the Phoenix theatre in New York, where her co-star in The Chairs was Eli Wallach.

In 1957, Plowright took over from Dorothy Tutin in the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer when it transferred to the West End. It introduced her to Olivier, who was playing the faded music-hall star Archie Rice, the father of her character. He had been impressed by Plowright’s performance in The Country Wife and jokily renamed her “Miss Wheelshare”. The Entertainer also became a film and Plowright would later choose a recording of Olivier singing Why Should I Care? as Archie Rice for one of her selections on Desert Island Discs. She went with the play to Broadway and later earned a Tony award playing Jo, the pregnant teenager in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, with Angela Lansbury in the role of her mother.

In 1960, Olivier and Plowright starred in a stage production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros directed by Orson Welles at the Royal Court. That year, Plowright divorced Gage. In 1961, Plowright married Olivier after sustained media coverage of their relationship and the end of his marriage to Vivien Leigh.

During Olivier’s directorship of the National, Plowright’s roles included Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder. In 1973, Franco Zeffirelli directed her in Eduardo de Filippo’s family drama Saturday, Sunday, Monday, where, she told the Observer: “I had to cook a ragout live on stage. The delicious smell sent people out at the interval looking happy but very hungry and the sale of sandwiches rocketed.” Zeffirelli directed her again in 1977 in De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano and again in 2003 in the Pirandello adaptation Absolutely! (Perhaps), both in London.

In 1988, Plowright directed a play about Marie Stopes, Married Love, and in 1990 she acted with her two daughters, Julie-Kate and Tamsin Olivier, in a production of Time and the Conways directed by her son, Richard Olivier. By that time her film career had gathered pace. In Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers she played the mother of Joely Richardson and Juliet Stevenson. There followed roles in an adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Dressmaker, the offbeat comedy I Love You to Death and Enchanted April, which was filmed in Portofino on the Italian Riviera and brought her an Oscar nomination for her performance as an imperious widow. The popular film Tea With Mussolini brought her back to Italy and back to Zeffirelli, casting her alongside fellow dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. She played the surrogate mother of a boy modelled on Zeffirelli.

In 2013, Plowright reprised her role as Saint Joan for a speech used at the 50th birthday celebration of the National Theatre. In 2018, she reminisced on her career alongside Dench, Smith and Eileen Atkins in Roger Michell’s film Nothing Like a Dame.