Glenda Jackson, a British actress who won two Academy Awards before being elected to Parliament in 1992 and retaining her seat for more than 20 years, has died. She was 87.
Jackson died at her home in London after a brief illness, the BBC cited her agent as saying.
Jackson rose to undersecretary for transport in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, made an unsuccessful run for mayor of London in 1999-2000 and was an outspoken Labour Party member in the House of Commons, the lower house of the UK Parliament.
In 2013, at a Commons memorial for Margaret Thatcher, Jackson provoked an outcry by saying the Conservative former prime minister “wreaked heinous social, economic and spiritual damage” on the country through her policies.
Even Jackson’s son, Dan Hodges, a union consultant and Labour supporter, said his mother’s attack was wrong for the occasion and embarrassed him, much as did the TV reruns of her movie nude scenes when he was a schoolboy.
After holding her Hampstead and Kilburn seat with a slim 42-vote margin in 2010, Jackson decided not to run for again for parliament.
Political Egos
In assessing her time in the legislature, she said MPs showed neither the discipline nor dedication of actors. Too much time was wasted in a Commons that was filled with “egos the size of which I’ve never seen in my life before,” she said.
“The view that all actors are undisciplined and self-indulgent is rubbish,” she said in Women’s Journal in 2001. “If you want to see that kind of behavior, come to Parliament.”
Well before she swapped acting for lawmaking, Jackson fretted about the parts offered to her on stage and in film. Playwrights “seem to have no interest in women over the age of 30,” she told Anna Quindlen in a New York Times interview in 1981. Women were peripheral to most plots, she said, and “have to fit into some kind of box — the wife, the mother.”
Still, Jackson confessed to feeling “terribly bitchy doing this complaining because I really have had the most wonderful run” in theater, movies and television.
Her run extended into her 80s when she returned to the stage after two decades away. She played King Lear in London in 2016 and then on Broadway. In 2018, she won a Tony Award for her performance in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women.
Early Years
Glenda May Jackson was born May 9, 1936, in Birkenhead, England, where her father was a bricklayer and her mother worked as a cleaner. After high school, and work at a Boots pharmacy, Jackson won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She attracted notice in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1965 production of Marat/Sade as the asylum inmate Charlotte Corday, who assassinates Marat. She also played the role on Broadway and in the film.
Jackson gained her first Oscar for the 1969 movie Women in Love. The film kept to D.H. Lawrence’s book and featured a famous nude wrestling scene involving the two male stars, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed.
The next year, Jackson starred in a Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers, which was trounced by critics.
Emmy Awards
Jackson said she had to steel herself for nude scenes, but didn’t hesitate to shave her head as Queen Elizabeth I for BBC television; she received two Emmy awards when Elizabeth R ran in the US in the 1970s.
She was nominated, but didn’t win, an Academy Award for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and received her second Oscar for A Touch of Class (1973), which co-starred George Segal as a married American in London with whom she has an affair.
She appeared as the lead in Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler in London and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1975 film version, titled simply Hedda.
On Broadway, Jackson acted in plays such as Macbeth and Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude after they transferred from London.
Stage Fright
While in Strange Interlude, she told an interviewer in 1985 that she had stage fright nightly because “the more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult it is to be good.”
For all her dramatic roles, she relished starring with Walter Matthau in the 1980 comedy spy caper Hopscotch. Comedy is tough to do well, she said, but more fun.
Once installed in the Commons, Jackson said she no longer found time to attend plays for fear she would miss a key vote during an evening session. She was a fervent supporter of Prime Minister Blair at first, but was among his fiercest critics when he pushed for higher-education fees and backed the Iraq war.
Jackson was married to Roy Hodges, a theater director and art dealer, from 1958 to 1976.
