At the age of 87, Glenda Jackson passed away in her London home following “a brief illness.”.
Glenda Jackson, a politician and two-time Academy Award winner, passed away peacefully at home in Blackheath, London, this morning following a brief illness, according to a statement from her agent, Lionel Larner. ”.
Over six decades, Jackson dominated the constrained worlds of stage and screen like a titan. Although the notoriously sourpuss actress would undoubtedly have reached for her catchphrase: “Oh, come on. Nothing less than “Good God, no,” will do for a celebrity who returned to the stage at age 82 after a 23-year hiatus to play King Lear.
She didn’t just take home an Evening Standard theatre award for that performance; she also got the crowd on their feet by playing up to her fierce reputation by criticizing the awards’ sponsor. She said, “I’m left thinking what did I do wrong. The newspaper had mocked me as an actor and opposed me as an MP for decades.”.
Jackson was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1936, the first of four daughters to a bricklayer father and a cleaner mother. When she grew too tall, her early aspirations of becoming a dancer were dashed, and at 15, she quit West Kirby Grammar School for Girls in favor of a job working on Boots’ sales floor.
Women in Love, from 1969, starred Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich. Image: Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy.
After learning she enjoyed acting and being persuaded by a friend to join the local Townswomen’s Guild drama group, she applied to Rada, the only drama school she had heard of, with the condition that she could only afford to attend if she were awarded a scholarship. And so she did. In 1957, she made her professional stage debut in a two-part play by Terence Rattigan called Separate Tables in the seaside town of Worthing while still a student there.
She spent six years working as a stage manager and actor in repertory theaters across the nation before coming to the attention of the RSC. She joined the organization in 1964, right as director Peter Brook was making a name for himself with a season titled Theatre of Cruelty. He cast her in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade as a prisoner assigned to play Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday. Years later, playwright David Edgar remembered her performance as one of the best he had ever seen in a production that “changed British theatre for ever.”.
She later played the part again in a movie in 1967, by which time she had already made a brief screen debut in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. Two years later, in Ken Russell’s adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, she received the first of two best actress Oscars for her portrayal of the overtly sexual Gudrun, which she did not attend to accept.
This marked the start of her film career in earnest.
Later, she claimed that her statuettes had been left to her mother, whose ferocious polishing quickly removed the gilt.
Jackson and Gordon Brown engaged in general election campaigning in Jackson’s North London district. Photo by Andrew Winning/PA Images/PA Archive.
Her son, Dan, the only child of her 18-year marriage to fellow actor and antique dealer Roy Hodges, was due to be born six months after she finished filming Women in Love. However, two years later, she was back and acting in a variety of roles, far from slowing down for a while. Her roles in notable TV series Elizabeth R, for which she won two Emmys, as Queen Elizabeth I and as a mouthy, placard-wielding Cleopatra in the first of several comedy roles for the BBC’s Morecambe and Wise Show were among her achievements in 1971.
She also played the nymphomaniacal wife of Tchaikovsky in another Russell film, The Music Lovers.
As the sparring lover Vicki in the romantic comedy A Touch of Class, she received her second Oscar in 1973.
Even though she was outspoken about the lack of positive roles for women, she found them well into her fifties, at which point she made the startling choice to give it all up and run for parliament. From the time of her election in 1992 until the time of her resignation in 2015, she renounced her prior fame and devoted herself to serving as a Labour MP for the London neighborhoods of Hampstead and Kilburn.
In 2016, Jackson performed King Lear and the Fool with Rhys Ifans. Image courtesy of Tristram Kenton/The Guardian.
Her vociferous opposition to the Iraq war put an end to any aspirations she may have had for a top position in the government. Grandstanding opportunities were only available on special occasions like Margaret Thatcher’s passing, when she cut through sentimental parliamentary protocol with her own salty verdict on an ideology of “greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.”.
Following her triumphant return to the stage in King Lear, she won another award for her work as the stumbling, vituperative 92-year-old widow A in a Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and as Maud, the protagonist of Elizabeth Is Missing with Alzheimer’s disease (of which Guardian TV critic Lucy Mangan wrote that she was “wonderful, in that vanishingly rare way that can come only from next-level talent as razor-s. ”).
In her later years, she left her north London stronghold for a basement flat in the south London home of her son, Dan Hodges, who was then a political columnist with views that were very different from her own. There, she gardened, watched her grandson grow up, and continued to pour the finest sort of scorn on any passing folly or hypocrisy.
