The year after that, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theater School in London. She auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Orson Welles’s film adaptation of “Othello” (1951), but Welles was impressed and later invited her to be the only woman in the cast of “Moby Dick — Rehearsed,” which ran in London for three weeks in 1955. Parts of the play were filmed, but that film has been lost.
Her first big success on the London stage was as the title character in “The Country Wife” (1956), a lusty newlywed who discovers that she adores city life for all sorts of delicious reasons.
When Olivier saw the play, he visited her backstage to introduce himself and congratulate her. Two years later, they appeared together onstage in John Osborne’s comic drama “The Entertainer,” as a seedy song-and-dance man and his sympathetic daughter. (Olivier was 22 years her senior.) Mr. Osborne, London’s hot new angry-young-man playwright, was an old neighbor of Ms. Plowright’s from Scunthorpe.
-Beginning in 1956, Ms. Plowright worked with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater in London. After “The Country Wife,” she had lead roles in plays including Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” and Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” Olivier directed her there in productions including Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
Ms. Plowright’s American theater career was relatively limited. Her Broadway debut was a double role in Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and “The Lesson” (1958). After her successes with Olivier (in transfers from London) and in “A Taste of Honey,” she returned to Broadway only once more — as the title character, a retired prostitute with a plan, in “Filumena” (1980).
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