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.

Oscar-nominated UK actress Joan Plowright, a legend of stage and screen and wife of the great actor Laurence Olivier, has died at the age of 95, her family said Friday.

You’re no oil painting, but you’ve got the spark. Just thank God you’ve got my legs, and not your father’s," her mother once told her.