Dame Joan Plowright Had an Impressive Career That Spanned Decades Until She Retired

On Jan. 16, 2025, Dame Joan Plowright passed away. She was 95 years old, and she had long since retired from acting. But, before her death, what was Joan Plowright's net worth? Thanks to literal decades in theater and in movies, Joan's career was one that was successful for a long time. And it only ended when she decided it was time to retire in 2014.

Some of Joan's first roles as an actor were in theater. Her first role was in 1948 in a production called If Four Walls Told. From there, she seemed to alternate between television, movie, and stage roles. Her final feature film, Knife Edge, was released in 2009. Following her macular degeneration diagnosis and worsening eyesight, Joan retired. But she remained an icon in theater and movies until her death.

Not only was Joan a star on-stage and in film in her own right, but she was married to actor and director Sir Laurence Olivier for years until his own death in 1989. Joan was able to amass a fortune on her own, however her exact net worth is unknown. According to Celebrity Net Worth, her husband Laurence's net worth was $20 million.

Although Joan's exact net worth is unclear, it's safe to assume that it was somewhere close to her late husband's, especially since they had been together for almost 30 years before he passed away. And, outside of Laurence's career, Joan had a long-lasting acting career herself. Even before her marriage, she studied acting and had sought a career on the stage.

In a 2010 interview with The Actors Work, Joan shared that she felt drawn to the stage from an early age. She explained that her mother encouraged her and took her to theaters or ballet companies, where Joan could watch shows on-stage. And soon, her mother put on small productions herself.

"My mother would take me off to Nottingham or wherever a ballet company or the Old Vic were visiting when I was still a schoolgirl, because she loved it so," Joan said at the time. "She also formed an amateur dramatic society and was a very renowned amateur actress in the town. And she did plays, as they called it, with us as children, so that I learnt sort of fairly early on that I felt rather confident on stage. I felt more confident being somebody else on stage than I felt being myself in real life."

Thanks to what became a decades-long career in television, film, and theater, Joan went on to win a handful of coveted awards. In 1993, she won Golden Globes for both Stalin on television and Enchanted April in film. Prior to that, she also won a Tony Award in 1961 for A Taste of Honey.

Her last movie that wasn't a feature film was the documentary Nothing Like a Dame, which she appeared in alongside Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judi Dench, and Dame Maggie Smith.