‘On March 17 1961 I was married to Laurence Olivier and we were living in New York, both acting in plays on Broadway – he in Becket and I in A Taste of Honey – when the letter arrived. It came from an optician in Chichester who said he was about to build a theatre and would Sir Laurence consider becoming its first Artistic Director. Neither of us knew Chichester and at any other time in the life of a world-famous actor/director such a request would have elicited only a polite refusal. However, by a million-to-one chance this seemingly impossible shot in the dark found its target. It caught Larry at the moment he had started saying ‘what can I find that is new and challenging?’ and came, as he described it, ‘like God’s gift from heaven’.’

Dame Joan Plowright, The Lady Olivier
Foreword to Chichester Festival Theatre at Fifty – A Celebration by Kate Mosse, 2012

Dame Joan Plowright was so intimately connected with Chichester Festival Theatre’s history from its earliest days that it’s hard to imagine the Theatre without her. Dame Joan appeared in two plays during Olivier’s opening season in 1962 (while being pregnant with their second child): the very first production, The Chances, and then as Sonya in Olivier’s legendary production of Uncle Vanya, which proved so successful that it was revived the following year – both at Chichester and as one of the first productions of the newly formed National Theatre at The Old Vic.

1963 also saw Joan Plowright in one of her most memorable roles at Chichester (and then at the NT): the title role in Shaw’s Saint Joan, with Robert Stephens as the Dauphin and directed by John Dexter. She returned to the Festival Theatre on several occasions, long after Olivier’s directorship had come to an end: in 1972 as Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew opposite Anthony Hopkins as Petruchio, and as Jennifer Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma; in 1982 as Edith Cavell in Cavell; and in 1984 as Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World, with Maggie Smith as Millamant. She was also a frequent visitor to the Festival Theatre from her Sussex home.

In 2013, Joan Plowright recorded a speech from Saint Joan at the Old Vic for the National Theatre’s 50th anniversary gala performance. The National’s then Director, Nicholas Hytner, wrote:

‘A few days before the show, [Olivier’s] wife Joan Plowright, returned to the Old Vic to film a scene from George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, fifty years after she’d first played it. She asked if she could stop if she forgot or stumbled over her lines. I said we could stitch her performance together from as many takes as she wanted. The cameras rolled, and the years rolled back. She did the whole thing in one take. A young guy on the camera crew had no idea who she was, and no idea that she was playing a girl who was going defiant to the flames, but he was still in tears.’
Nicholas Hytner, Balancing Acts,  2017

‘Dame Joan Plowright was one of the supreme actors of her generation; we in Chichester were privileged that several of her most memorable performances were on the Festival Theatre stage. They, and she, will live long in our memories. We send our deepest sympathies to her family and friends.’
Justin Audibert, Artistic Director and Kathy Bourne, Executive Director