Dame Joan Plowright

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is an actress. She's one of the great ladies of the British stage, and has been at the forefront of her profession since she first appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in London half a century ago. In those days she was identified with the new wave, appearing in plays by writers such as Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. She went on to make her name in more established roles, winning Actress of the Year for her performance at Shaw St. Joan, and then through her marriage to Laurence Olivier became closely associated with his work at Chichester and the foundation of the National Theatre. They were married for twenty eight years. Since his death in 1989 she's added a career in film to her theatre work. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Enchanted April, and her latest film, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, will be released later this year. In it the eponymous heroine says, Most of my life I have been somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, and somebody's mother. I would like to spend the rest of my time here being simply myself.

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A line she might perhaps identify with in real life. She is, of course, Dame Joan Plowwright. Do you identify with Mrs Paulfrey Joan? Do you relish now, in your mid seventies, being fully your own person? Yes, I think I do. I don't think all my life has actually been spent

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as misses Palfrey's was, because misses Palfrey did

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Dedicate everything.

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to a marriage.

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and her husband and followed him everywhere.

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I think I've always kept

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A little

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Nugget.

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of Joan Plowwright

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even when I became Lady Olivia.

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You have always been your own person, really, haven't you? Your your brother David has said of you when you were a girl, you know, you made no concessions to being a woman. You wanted to be captain of the football team, you wanted to be the best at everything. I think I never actually realised there were limitations. So you were a very modern young woman. It's not surprising, probably, that you did end up in the new wave at the Royal Court, is it? Yes, and and.

Dame Joan Plowright2:26

Protocol.

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That was the place for all of us coming to London from the provinces.

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Because you were always going to get out of the provinces, weren't you? That was always your ambition. Yes. I didn't want to stay any longer in a small town. I mean, my mother, who had a lot of longings and yearnings for theatre, ballet, music, I think she

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She was always telling all three of us you must go out into a wider world. And you fulfilled her dreams, really, perhaps, did you?

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I guess I did, yeah.

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Yeah.

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Tell me about your first record. I chose this one because

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I've always loved Judy Garland.

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It's just the the theme of this particular song.

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Which I used to sing when I was a girl.

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And dream about when I went to bed, there was a a picture on my wall of kind of

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Turrets and

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Persian minarets. It was so sort of exotic and far away.

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And it made me think I want some sort of adventure.

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In some world that I have never seen yet. I want to go places. I want to get out of here.

Dame Joan Plowright3:59

Oh land that I heard of once in a lullaby

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Sorry where I

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But I'm really

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Judy Garland singing over the rainbow from the film The Wizard of Oz and reminds you, Dame Joan Plowwright, of escaping from Scunthorpe, or dreaming of escaping from Scunthorpe. Not that, as I understand it, your father wanted you to. He was the editor of the local newspaper, wasn't he, the Scunthorpe and Frodingham Star. Now he wanted you to be a journalist, didn't he?

Dame Joan Plowright4:31

Yeah.

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Yes, he did. I think he thought it was such a precarious profession, the one I wanted to go into.

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His only experience of it had been bailing out chorus girls who'd been stranded in Gainsborough, where he first started as a Cub reporter, and he thought it was a dreadful profession. Obviously y you had your mother's jeans. She was in amateur dramatics. She'd wanted to be a ballet dancer at the end of the day. Oh yes.

Dame Joan Plowright4:59

Yeah.

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Yes, she ran away from home, first of all, but it was not considered respectable to go into the theatre, either as a dancer or an actress.

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She ran her own amateur dramatic society. When I first went home after my first success and people had sort of

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Read about me and

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I would meet um solicitors in the street or something, going down the high street.

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And they would just say, Oh, well, of course, I mean, we're not at all surprised. We saw your mother as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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So you you obviously fulfilled her dreams in spades. You also married the great actor of the era, Laurence Olivia. She must have been

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Thrilled to bits was she when you married him? Not at the beginning. She wasn't quite sure what was going on at the beginning.

Dame Joan Plowright5:44

What was going on?

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She thought he was a bit of a philanderer. But of course we had both fallen in love with him.

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At Heathcliff. In the film of Wuthering Heights. But your father must have been.

Dame Joan Plowright5:54

In the film

Dame Joan Plowright5:55

Yeah.

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Very worried about I mean, fathers don't like their daughters marrying men twenty-two years older than themselves. No, no. He was very worried. Well, they both were, but

Dame Joan Plowright6:00

Well they don't like

Dame Joan Plowright6:04

Okay.

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They understood that it was a very deep

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Love

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that it was what both of us

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perhaps needed at that time.

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And I think my parents gradually realized that

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You know, it was not just philandering. It was a th the depth of the relationship was nothing to do just with physical attraction or feeling thinking or falling in love. It was an an ideal of

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Something that was kind of bigger than both of us, and that is the formation of a company of actors that.

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could be the best in the world, which is what he wanted.

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Record number two. This is really in tribute to my mother. It's Catherine Ferrier. I mean it is also because it's a memory of

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My first introduction to it when she played this record to me.

Speaker 47:10

Other leaves, all the leaves.

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Blow the wind south o'er the bunye blue sea.

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Oh, the wind southerly, southerly, southerly

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Love only breathes my love heart to me.

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They told me last night there were sheeps in the offing, And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea.

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But my eye could not see it wherever might be.

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Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Wind Southerly You went to London for an audition, Joan, when you were just a a girl of sixteen. For an audition in Soho. That was very daring.

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My brother, who's at music college, met me and took me to this dreadful little office up some back stairs where there was a waiting room full of um

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dyed blondhair ladies in nylons and fur coats and What did you look like? I was I was in my school raincoat, if I remember rightly, under Berry.

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I didn't it didn't occur to me that that clothes and mattered all that much. I I liked acting. I knew I could act. And what had you prepared? What what did you do for your audition?

Dame Joan Plowright8:43

And what did you

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Oh, I had prepared one or two things, but I never got the opportunity to do anything. He just called me in.

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and said, Look at this various waste paper baskets full of torn up letters. He was just telling me about the precarious nature of the profession and after

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So two, three minutes. He just sent me, um

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Go home, my dear, go home.

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That was it? That was it. I wasn't allowed to do

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any audition that I had prepared.

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But I did then do what, in fact, my father suggested more qualifications in case I needed to do something else. But you didn't need to do something else, because in the end you won a place at the Old Vic Theatre School, didn't you? Yes, I did. After that,

Dame Joan Plowright9:26

But you just

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You got your first part in London given to you by none other than Orson Welles. I mean, you began big.

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I mean, talk about, you know, dreaming of somewhere else other than Scunthorpe, yes.

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I auditioned for him first of all when he was going to do Othello, and I didn't get that. But he'd sort of sent a letter saying

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If he was doing anything else he would remember me, and and indeed he did when he was going to do this strange but brilliant production of Moby Dick.

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Cos it go.

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you know, and a different sorts of reviews and

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When I came in.

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On the second night.

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Warson was already in his dressing room, and he called out as I went past, Congratulations on your notices

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and I, remembering only the poor reviews, said rather sulkily Which notices?

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And he said, You've had exactly the same mixture of notices as I have, good and bad.

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And I've been in the business forty years, and you're just starting. Why should you presume you will please everybody?

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Next record, number three.

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This will bring quite a few memories. It's the Halley Orchestra.

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And

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We used to attend those concerts.

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My parents used to have quite quite exuberant rows where they would smash crockery.

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They would not be speaking to each other, so they would communicate through their children. So my father would say.

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Ask your mother if I'm to get tickets for the Barbarolli concert next month.

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And then we knew, yes, everything would be all right.

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And

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The Elgar is is one of the things we all heard together and

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was

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The only time during those orchestral concerts that we ever saw

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My father, who was a very undemonstrative man usually,

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Uh weeping.

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Music made him weep, and particularly this one.

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Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations played by the Halley Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barb Rowley.

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A very important turning point came in your career, Joan Plowright, in nineteen fifty six. You'd have been in your mid twenties and you were invited to join the new wave of directors, writers and actors at the Royal Court Theatre in in Stone Square, Chelsea.

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I mean, the names are amazing, aren't they? Arnold Wesker and John Osborne and Samuel Beckett, directed by George Devine and Tony Richardson, starring Tom Courteney, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Peter O'Tour. You really must have felt, you know, you were in the right place at the right time. You really hit the spot, didn't you?

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Ah, yes I suddenly felt oh my goodness now

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Now I'm where I should be.

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It was the first time one had been

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working alongside

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Uh, writers. I mean, John Osborne was also acting in the company before his first play was produced. You were inevitably, of course, called an angry young woman because, you know, Osborne et al. were called angry young men. But you weren't particularly angry. I think you were pretty delighted. We were all labelled angry young men and women after Look Back and Anger had opened, of course. But I mean, the fact is one did an enormous range of characters, for that was what the company was about.

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I did the chairs.

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the in Esco chairs playing a ninety year old woman and and uh the next one a seventeen year old student. But you did play Beatty Bryan, didn't you, in in Wesker's Roots, and she has a kind of angry speech at the end, isn't she the daughter of the Norfolk family? Oh, that is true.

Dame Joan Plowright14:02

But you did

Dame Joan Plowright14:10

Oh that is

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Beatty Bryant was a kind of blazing pot for me, and in this final speech she suddenly realizes.

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That she is talking for herself.

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and she says and and she suddenly stops in mid-flow and says, It's me, this is me talking.

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I'm not quoting anymore.

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And that's when the curtain comes down.

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Well, this is very special. It is Laurence Olivier, I better say that, in a speech from Henry the Fifth, and I had written him a letter. My daughter found a schoolgirl diary which said got a letter back from Merlot.

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Obviously I'd written and congratulate

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Ha ha And I'm sure the letter really was from his secretary, but never mind.

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Because the film was what, in about 1944, wasn't it? Yes. Just just before the end of the war. So you'd have been you'd have again, you'd have been fifteen writing to this great actorial.

Dame Joan Plowright15:02

Yes.

Dame Joan Plowright15:07

Right

Dame Joan Plowright15:08

Cause you

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Ha ha.

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But I also

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Did this speech myself.

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End the film

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Tea with Mussolini.

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So that it has many connotations. It also, of course.

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brings back him

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His voice and that.

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trademark cry at the end, which other actors would try to copy and never really succeed.

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Anyway.

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Just wonderful.

Speaker 415:42

We few, we happy few.

Speaker 415:45

We band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so base, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap, whilst any speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin's Day.

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Laurence Olivier delivering Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech from the 1944 film of the play. Great stuff.

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You met him for the first time backstage. He came backstage to congratulate you on a performance, didn't he? You must remember the moment. Yes.

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Yes, it was the country wife. It was my first leading part at the royal court.

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And he was very, very charming.

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Though he said later that.

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He saw in our eyes a kind of um defiance about being invaded by.

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By the establishment. Because he came with his then wife Vivian Lee, didn't he? Yes. But by all accounts he was entranced by you from the very beginning. So he says in this book, yes. He did, he says.

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Let me quote: Miss Joan Plowwright, whose very name was enough to make me think thoughts of love. Did you think in that moment that there might be a future? No, of course not.

Dame Joan Plowright17:04

Then that might be a huge challenge.

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I was still playing in the countrywife, and there were plans.

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to make a film of it.

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And they had talked to me about the film and offered me a seven-year contract, and that was when George Devine came and asked me if I would

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take over the part of Gene Rice in the Entertainer with Lawrence Olivia. In the West End. In the West End.

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If I had chosen to do the film, I might never have worked or met again with Laurence Olivia. Who knows? There was rapport from from the beginning, isn't it? Yes. Well, yes, he was uh teasing and uh called me Miss Wheelchare instead of Miss Plara and said it was equally agricultural. I've flirted quite a bit.

Dame Joan Plowright17:40

Yeah.

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And then I thought, well, of course he does that all the time, you know, that's part of his uh charisma. So when was the point that you thought, hang on, this is not just another flirtation.

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I'm feeling something and

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Well this is the beginning of something big.

Dame Joan Plowright18:06

I

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But I

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He would always kind of engineer that other people around left before I did.

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And then he would talk, you know, about his life and and

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that he was at a at a crossroads, that

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life had become

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Horrendous.

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for him and he had to make a break and

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And he wanted, you said, tenderness. He actually wanted a family life. He wanted to be still, to be.

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To be solid, a life of substance, not sort of living out of a trunk and

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huge cattle glitzy parties which he never enjoyed.

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Um

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you know, though they'd been this kind of golden couple. They were

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two very different people, and it had become obvious as time went by.

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Next piece of music.

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We finally were free.

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to marry after quite some time of waiting.

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And we were both in New York. I had gone

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to do A Taste of Honey. George Devine and Tony Richerton put me on in that on Broadway and he was coming along later to do Beckett. And we went out to a little village, Wilton, Connecticut, to

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get to the registry office to get married and there was a nice little lady and we went and stood in front of her and she said to Larry, What is your name?

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And he said, Laurence Olivier. And she said, And what is your profession?

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He said, I am an actor, Martin.

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And she said, Oh, that's nice.

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And uh

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I don't think he banked on being quite so anonymous as all that. And my next record is to do with.

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The show that we both went to see and loved, and that is West Side Story.

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And it was something we

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Share the lab form.

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And perhaps particularly this song, because it it's a love song.

Speaker 420:12

Bumpum Bumpum

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That was Maria from Westside Story with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philemonic. Bernstein, who of course wrote Westside Story. Just tell me a little bit more, Joan, if you would, about the period of time between falling in love and getting married, because it must have been very difficult for you. Was the press very intrusive then? I uh was totally bewildered because I'd never naturally never been through anything like it before. He had and um was very

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Worried.

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that it would prove too much for me. The problem would have been though, wouldn't it, that the public would have been on the side of Vivienne Lee as it were, because they knew about her and she would have looked vulnerable and she was older and maybe, you know, Olivier was leaving her for a younger woman. That would have been difficult for you to contend with because your relationship ran deeper than that and it wasn't just another little affair, was it? Yes, yes. I think you see quite a number of people actually did know about their marriage and the difficulties of it and the fact that divorce had been discussed.

Dame Joan Plowright21:38

Mm.

Presenter21:39

Okay, she'd had an affair with Peter Finch, I think, hadn't?

Dame Joan Plowright21:39

Thank you.

Presenter21:41

Yes, exactly. Before I even met him they had been on the verge of divorce two or three times, but it hadn't happened.

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I mean, she was ill. She was a manic depressive, wasn't she? Yes. And and that is why

Dame Joan Plowright21:52

A yes.

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You know, we waited because you didn't want to force

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someone with with that affliction to into doing something violent.

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which uh could have been possible.

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Did you ever meet?

Dame Joan Plowright22:09

Did you have a meet?

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Only in theatre receptions, but that was

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That was before I was involved with Larry. And But not afterwards, you mean? Oh, no. No, no, no. He didn't want us to meet because he wasn't sure.

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Or what in those circumstances?

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What happened?

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You see she changed her mind rather a lot, which was difficult. She would agree to divorce one day and then change her mind the next. So that was when I said, Yes, we'll have a year apart and if the love is deep enough

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It will last, and we will be together.

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And if it isn't, it won't.

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But it would be put to the test.

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And it passed. It passed the test. Yes. And you did get married, as we've heard, and you went on to have three children. What kind of father was he, Laurence Olivia? He tried very hard to be a good father. I mean, he didn't have a lot of time, let's face it. He did once offer to take over on the Nanny's Day and Night Off.

Dame Joan Plowright22:51

Yeah.

Dame Joan Plowright22:59

He

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And give me a break. They were babies.

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Uh so he slept in the danny's room next to baby's and said I could have a full night's sleep and baby would be absolutely fine. And uh I came down about half past seven because there was quite a noise going on and

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And I went in and of course the you know, there was apple puree and baby cereal all over the floor and all over their faces and all over him.

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And he said, Oh, thank God you've come

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I'd rather play Othello eight times a week than ever do this again.

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Record number six.

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This is a bit of Mozart, because it's been played to my grandchildren as small babies, because it is supposed to develop the brain. So I thought if it does that small babies, it could probably retain brain power for people who are older. And stuck on desert islands. And stuck on a desert island.

Dame Joan Plowright24:00

And stuck on the desert.

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Mitzku Cheetah playing part of the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata in C major. Um you said, Joan, that that that Larry could be very difficult. I think you once said, you know, you'd have died for him, but there were times when you didn't know how to live with him. Uh and he got more difficult, didn't he, as he got older because he became ill. I think he developed prostate cancer and a muscle wasting disease.

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There's a feeling that he really did rage against the dying of the light, didn't he? Yes, yes, he did. Well, who wouldn't, after such a life as he'd led? I mean, he was a man

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touched by genius, and such men are usually also attended by demons.

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And he would fight to overcome those demons and

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Some he would and some he wouldn't.

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I mean, mostly he he did.

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He did do it very well. He he did behave very well.

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And he displayed such courage.

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And we had so many kind of false alarms that is he did. I mean, I remember one.

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Journey when he had pneumonia and go going to the hospital and he asked the driver to go to the old Vic, and it was in the morning, and there was not anybody much about there's a stage carpenter, an electrician, and the stage doorkeeper.

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and he sort of gathered them together and sort of said goodbye.

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And they were all absolutely horrified when they heard his breathing, kept saying to me, Get him out of here, get him out of here.

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Which I finally did, and we got to St Thomas's, and actually all was well, and he was out again and working within a year. He was rehearsing.

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He was rehearsing for the end, hmm? Yes. Yeah.

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And have you felt

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Since his death, seventeen years ago now, have you felt like the keeper of the flame? You know, different things have happened and odd mistresses have come out of the woodwork, or there have been biographies written suggesting that he might have had homosexual liaisons and things.

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That must be very distressing, but have you felt it's fallen to you throughout this time to defend his memory?

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I don't think there's any need to defend his memory. His performances, his greatness as an artist.

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are there and they are there in the films like the one we we had an extract from today.

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As I said, if a man is touched by genius, he isn't an ordinary person. He doesn't lead an ordinary life.

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He has extremes of behaviour which you understand, and you just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons.

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kind of stand apart, continue

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your own work and your absorption in the family.

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And those other things don't really matter.

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Finally.

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Next piece of music, number seven.

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Well now, when we were at the National Theatre we had we had the invasion of Franco Zepharelli.

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And then the happiest

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One

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The Neapolitan Eduardo di Filippo,

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Saturday, Sunday, Monday, in which Larry played the grandpapa.

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I played Mamma and Frank Findlay was the father. The setting was a big kind of Sunday lunch, a huge table, and w everybody came on to take their call, and the great big table, the dining table, was there just empty. Everybody came on, took a bow, and then rushed off and got a plate and or the cloth. By the time Frank and I came on together to take the final call, the table was set and we just went to our places and then everybody raised their glasses to the audience. And it brought the house down.

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And this was the tune that was played during it.

Speaker 428:45

One of my mother the fato, one of my mother the fato

Speaker 428:50

Vosabeko me fascetu, vosabecum e fascetu.

Presenter29:15

That was Giuseppe di Stefano singing Come facetta mameta, How Do You Do It, Mamma, a Neapolitan folk song.

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Joan Plowwright, more professional plans in the pipeline, or are you spending more time with your grandchildren these days?

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There are one or two things in the pipeline, but n not really much point in talking about them until they materialise. But you want to do more is the point. Very occasionally.

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And I'd quite like to.

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have the time to um

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Just enjoy the art of living, which I haven't had a lot of time to do.

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in a very busy life.

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And I've had no time to stand and stare. Well, you can do it, of course, on your your desert island and reflect on what's obviously been really quite a not just a busy but a tumultuous life. Do you think when you you

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Sit on the sand and think about it. Are you going to have any regrets? No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have those because

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I believe there is a kind of a kind of destiny.

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I know you make choices.

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But I think what turns out is what is best.

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Because something guided those choices, which is very personal and to do with you, and it's your

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Tapestry you are weaving.

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And you've learnt a great deal from it.

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and experienced great joy.

Presenter30:40

And sorrow and that

Presenter30:43

That makes you a more rounded human being.

Presenter30:47

Last record.

Presenter30:48

The last record is, I guess, a kind of statement.

Presenter30:53

It's Edith Pierre, again, a vulnerability, uh, quite a tough life, like Judy Garland.

Presenter31:00

But emerged from it.

Presenter31:02

And it it is atmospheric. Reminds you of cafes in France and sitting on the sidewalk and having

Presenter31:08

Coffee or perma.

Presenter31:10

And all the things that Paris is and

Presenter31:12

Anyway, Piauf!

Dame Joan Plowright31:17

Hallelujah

Dame Joan Plowright31:21

Nonson Regretorians.

Dame Joan Plowright31:26

Nila bea forma

Dame Joan Plowright31:31

Need a mile

Dame Joan Plowright31:42

No.

Presenter31:44

If you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take, Joan? I would take the Mozart in that I would um spend the rest of my life getting the fingering.

Presenter31:59

In other words, I'm going to take a piano.

Presenter32:02

Well, that's your luxury? That is my luxury. Right. And that will I will

Presenter32:07

practice that Mozart sonata for the rest of my life on the Desert Island.

Presenter32:13

And, um, think of my grandchildren who who'll be sort of grown up young men and women then.

Presenter32:19

And uh you can take a book to read as well, as well as the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter32:24

Yes, indeed. And and I've decided after longfall.

Presenter32:28

Have to take Marcel Proust.

Presenter32:31

remembrance of things past, an a recherche du temp per dieu

Presenter32:36

Because

Presenter32:38

It's epic. It takes you such a long time to get to the end of one sentence. And there is such a wonderful love affair between the boy and his grandmother, and as a grandmother now, and and with grandsons, I recognise it, and it's very moving.

Presenter32:57

That's the book. That's the book.

Presenter32:59

Dame Joan Plowright, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 233:11

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.