Inside the wonderful world of Joan Plowright including marriage to Laurence Olivier that defied all critics
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THE lights in London’s West End will be dimmed for two minutes on Tuesday in honour of award-winning actress Dame Joan Plowright, who has died at the age of 95. She was a star of stage and screen for more than 70 years, but her toughest role was being the wife of the world’s most famous actor, Lord Laurence Olivier.
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Critics said their marriage would not last, but Joan learned to live with the Oscar-winner’s demons and voracious appetite for sex, and they stayed together for nearly 30 years. In a rare interview in 2006, Joan admitted Larry, as he liked to be called, was “a man touched by genius and such men are also attended by demons”.
![[Joan Plowright in 101 Dalmatians.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/d55eb07a-6634-4d97-a221-a475605e2ab1.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
She added: “He would fight to overcome those demons and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t. “If a man is touched by genius, he is not an ordinary person. He doesn’t lead an ordinary life. “He has extremes of behaviour, which you understand and you just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons.”.
![[Joan Plowright in a theatrical production of Twelfth Night.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/joan-plowright-gtv-archive-alec-964414294.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Joan fell in love with the man who would become her second husband in 1956, while playing his daughter in John Osborne’s West End play The Entertainer. She had married actor Roger Gage just three years earlier and Laurence, who was 22 years her senior, was unhappily wed to Vivien Leigh, star of Gone With The Wind.
Larry had confided in a friend that his wife’s sex drive was too much for him, saying: “With Vivien, it’s every day, two or three times. She’s wearing me out.”. And when Vivien started an affair with the actor Peter Finch, it was almost with his approval.
![[Joan Plowright holding her Damehood award at Buckingham Palace.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2004-dame-joan-widow-laurence-964429286.jpg?strip=all&w=743)
