Dame Joan Plowright, a British acting titan whose partnership with her late husband Sir Laurence Olivier turned the British theatre scene into one of the finest in the world, has died at the age of 95,

A Tony Award winner in 1961 for Tony Richardson and George Devine’s A Taste of Honey and an Oscar nominee for Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991), Plowright belonged to a celebrated group of British actresses (Judi Dench and Maggie Smith among them) who came into their own in the 1960s and ’70s.

Joan Plowright, an English actress whose marriage to celebrated actor-director Laurence Olivier conferred on her instant rank among the theatrical nobility and who carved her own considerable and singular place on the British stage,