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Joan Plowright, a British acting legend of stage and screen and the widow of Laurence Olivier, has died at the age of 95, Variety reports. A cause of death has not been disclosed.

She was the recipient of a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play (for 1961’s A Taste of Honey) and two Golden Globes — one for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (for Enchanted April) and the other for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film (for HBO’s Stalin) — both of which she was awarded in 1993. She is one of only four actresses...

Joan Plowright, perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century and the widow of Laurence Oliver, died on Thursday. She was 95.

Plowright was a prominent actress of stage and screen in her own right, especially in her native England, and was a Tony winner for “A Taste of Honey.” The actress had retired in 2014 after going blind due to macular degeneration.

Her family confirmed the news of her death to The Guardian on Friday, writing: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 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...

Nicholas de Jongh pays tribute to the Brief Encounter star

Celia Johnson died in her prime - at the age of 73. There was no other actress on the English stage whose career reached its zenith, a luminous Indian summer on both stage and television, in middle and old age. She defined to perfection a social type occupying the entrenched territories of middle and upper-middle class gentility, whose crisp, understated manners and stringent lack of sentimentality she conveyed to the manner born.

Yet she did not simply serve as a comprehensive guide-book to or map of a contracting portion of England. She incarnated qualities both of restraint and of passion; she knew everything about high English comedy whose airs of distraction and self-absorbed remoteness she conveyed so sharply in Coward's Hay Fever and Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking; more surprisingly she was able in old age to act indelibly roles of high tragic velocity and pathos,...

The ideal arthouse film is set in a part of the world few of us know and even fewer intend to visit. The steppes of Central Asia or a forlorn village in Central America are fine, but rural Slovakia will do in an emergency. The arthouse film should make us feel that we understand the world better than we do, even though we don't. It should give us a sense of moral and intellectual superiority over people who go to see Tom Cruise movies. It should star Tilda Swinton, or seem like a film in which she would be likely to appear. It should be a bit grainy. Gypsies, often in distress, may be in the mix, but generally not the Amish. Ideally, a proper arthouse film should have mangled subtitles. Children should be abandoned, or on a long trip over the mountains, or trying to recover lost shoes, or...

Dermot Mulroney, Donald Sutherland, Michael Vartan and Denise Richards have joined the cast of Jolene, director Dan Ireland's new film starring newcomer Jessica Chastain in the title role. Rupert Friend and Theresa Russell also are starring. Jolene, which is shooting in Arizona, is being produced by Next Turn Prods.' Riva Yares, who originally optioned the story, and Zachary Matz, who produced Ireland's most recent film, the indie hit Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Its screenplay was written by Dennis Yares. The project is based on E.L. Doctorow's tale Jolene: A Life, from the 2004 collection Sweet Land Stories. It centers on a red-haired heroine (Chastain) whose cross-country adventures beginning at age 15 are tracked over the course of a decade. Chastain most recently starred opposite Al Pacino in the title role in the Los Angeles stage production of Salome.

CANNES -- Dan Ireland's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont has turned into a bit of a sleeper market hit at Cannes, with the BBC picking up TV rights from Cineville International. Video and theatrical rights are being negotiated separately, with the film rumored to be an entry at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Rialto has acquired all rights for Australia and New Zealand as well as taking the rights for the Cineville production and Sundance official selection entry Steal Me. Gilad has picked up all rights for Israel, while Mexico's Kurt Hollander took all rights on Mrs. Palfrey and the market debuts Carambola and Justine: A Woman for Sale. Italy, Canada and the U.K. are in negotiations.