Glenda May Jackson (9 May 1936 – 15 June 2023) was an English actress and politician. Over the course of her distinguished career she received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, three Emmy Awards and a Tony Award, making her one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting". Her other accolades include two BAFTA Awards and a Golden Globe Award. A member of the Labour Party, she served continuously as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 23 years, first for Hampstead and Highgate from 1992 to 2010, and then, following boundary changes, for Hampstead and Kilburn from 2010 to 2015.
Jackson won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for the romance films Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973), but she did not appear in person to collect either due to work commitments. She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). Her other notable films include Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Hedda (1975), The Incredible Sarah (1976), House Calls (1978), Stevie (1978) and Hopscotch (1980). She won two Primetime Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC series Elizabeth R (1971). She received both the BAFTA Award and International Emmy Award for her performance in Elizabeth Is Missing (2019).
She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and made her Broadway theatre debut in Marat/Sade (1966). She received five Laurence Olivier Award nominations for her West End theatre roles in Stevie (1977), Antony and Cleopatra (1979), Rose (1980), Strange Interlude (1984) and King Lear (2016), the last being her first role after a 25-year absence from acting, which she reprised on Broadway in 2019. On Broadway, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in the revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women (2018) and received nominations for her work in Marat/Sade (1966), Rose (1981), Strange Interlude (1985), and Macbeth (1988).
Jackson transitioned her career to politics from 1992 to 2015, and was elected MP for Hampstead and Highgate at the 1992 general election. She was a junior transport minister from 1997 to 1999 during the first Blair ministry; she later became critical of Tony Blair. After constituency boundary changes, she represented Hampstead and Kilburn from 2010. At the 2010 general election, her majority of 42 votes, confirmed after a recount, was the narrowest margin of victory in Great Britain. Jackson stood down at the 2015 general election and returned to acting.
Early life and education Glenda May Jackson was born at 151 Market Street in Birkenhead, Cheshire, on 9 May 1936. Her mother named her after the Hollywood film star Glenda Farrell. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Hoylake, also on the Wirral. Her family was poor, and lived in a two-up two-down house with an outside toilet at 21 Lake Place. Her father Harry was a bricklayer, who served on minesweepers and was largely absent, for six years during World War II, while her mother Joan (née Pearce) worked in a local shop, pulled pints in a pub and was a domestic cleaner.
The eldest of four daughters, Jackson was educated at Holy Trinity Church of England and Cathcart Street primary schools, followed by West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls in nearby West Kirby. Poor exam results led to her leaving school at 16, to work at Boots Pharmacy for two years.
Jackson performed in the Townswomen's Guild drama group through her teenage years. She made her first acting appearance in J. B. Priestley's Mystery of Greenfingers in 1952 for the YMCA Players in Hoylake. She auditioned in London, for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1954, obtaining a discretionary award from Cheshire education committee that helped to finance her acting course. In January 1955, she moved to London, to commence her studies with RADA.Jennifer Uglow, et al. The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 276 (US: Boston: Northeastern University Press)
Acting career
1957–1968: Rise to prominence In January 1957, Jackson made her professional stage debut in Ted Willis's Doctor in the House at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing. This was followed by Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, while Jackson was still at RADA,D. Keith Peacock "Jackson, Glenda [May]" in Colin Chambers (ed) The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, London: Continuum, 2002 , p.398. and she began appearing in repertory theatre."Glenda Jackson (1936– )", in Who's Who in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. She was also a stage manager at Crewe in repertory theatre.
From 1958 to 1961, Jackson went through a period of two and a half years in which she was unable to find acting work. She unsuccessfully auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and undertook what she later described as "a series of soul-destroying jobs". This included waitressing at The 2i's Coffee Bar, clerical work for a large City of London firm, answering phones for a theatrical agent, and a role at British Home Stores. She also worked as a Bluecoat at Butlin's Pwllheli holiday resort on the Llŷn Peninsula in North West Wales, where her new husband and fellow actor Roy Hodges was a Redcoat. Jackson eventually returned to repertory theatre in Dundee, but worked in bars in between acting jobs.
Jackson made her film debut in a bit part in the kitchen sink drama This Sporting Life (1963). A member of the RSC for four years from 1963, she originally joined for director Peter Brook's Theatre of Cruelty season, which included Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1965), in which she played an inmate of an insane asylum portraying Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat. The production ran on Broadway in 1965 and in Paris (Jackson also appeared in the 1967 film version). She appeared as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet the same year. Critic Penelope Gilliatt thought Jackson was the only Ophelia she had seen who was ready to play the Prince himself.Penelope Gilliatt. "Making Sunday Bloody Sunday" , The Criterion Collection, reprint of Gilliatt's introduction to the US publication of the script (1971).
The RSC's staging at the Aldwych Theatre of US (1966), a protest play against the Vietnam War, also featured Jackson, and she appeared in its film version, Tell Me Lies."Peter Brook Returns to the RSC to Host a Theatre of Protest Event" , RSC, October 2011. A documentary of the stage production also exists, see Stuart Heaney "Benefit of the Doubt (1967)" , BFI screenonline Later that year, she starred in the psychological drama Negatives (1968), which was not a huge financial success, but won her more good reviews.
1969–1980: Breakthrough and acclaim
Jackson's starring role in Ken Russell's film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1969) led to her first Academy Award for Best Actress. Brian McFarlane, the main author of The Encyclopedia of British Film, wrote: "Her blazing intelligence, sexual challenge and abrasiveness were at the service of a superbly written role in a film with a passion rare in the annals of British cinema." In the process of gaining funding for The Music Lovers (1970) from United Artists, Russell explained it as "the story of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac", the couple being the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and Antonina Miliukova, played by Jackson. The film received mixed reviews in the US; the anonymous reviewer in Variety wrote of the two principals, "Their performances are more dramatically bombastic than sympathetic, or sometimes even believable." The Music Lovers was a box-office success in Europe, reaching No. 1 in the UK's weekly rankings in March 1971. It was the first of four films starring Jackson which topped the box-office charts in the UK. Jackson was initially interested in the role of Sister Jeanne in The Devils (1971), Russell's next film, but turned it down after script rewrites and deciding that she did not wish to play a third neurotic character in a row.
Jackson had her head shaved to play Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC's serial Elizabeth R (1971). After the series aired on PBS in the US, she received two Primetime Emmy Awards for her performance. She also played Queen Elizabeth in the film Mary, Queen of Scots; and gained an Academy Award nomination as well as a BAFTA Award for her role in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (both 1971). In July, Sunday Bloody Sunday topped the UK box-office charts for two weeks. That year, British exhibitors voted her the sixth most popular star at the British box office.Peter Waymark. "Richard Burton top draw in British cinemas." The Times, London, 30 December 1971: 2. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 11 July 2012. Jackson's popularity was such that 1971 saw her receive Best Film Actress awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain (who also rewarded her similarly in 1975 and 1978), the New York Film Critics and the US National Society of Film Critics. Mary, Queen of Scots was premièred in December 1971 in Los Angeles and was the 1972 Royal Film Performance in Britain, attended by the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. via YouTube. ThamesTv. The film reached No. 1 in the UK box-office charts in April that year, a position it held for five consecutive weeks.
Jackson made the first of several appearances with Morecambe and Wise in their 1971 Christmas special. Appearing in a comedy sketch as Cleopatra for the BBC Morecambe and Wise Show, she delivered the line, "All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got." Her later appearances included a song-and-dance routine (where she was pushed offstage by Eric), a period drama about Queen Victoria, and another musical routine (in their Thames Television series) where she was elevated ten feet in the air by a misbehaving swivel chair. Jackson and Wise also appeared in a 1981 information film for the Blood Transfusion Service.
Filmmaker Melvin Frank saw Jackson's comedy skills in the Morecambe and Wise Show and offered her the lead female role in his romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973), co-starring George Segal, which was a UK box-office No. 1 in June 1973. In February 1974, Jackson's role in the film won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. She continued to work in the theatre, returning to the RSC for the lead in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. A later film version directed by Trevor Nunn was released as Hedda (1975), for which Jackson was nominated for an Oscar. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: "This version of Hedda Gabler is all Miss Jackson's Hedda and, I must say, great fun to watch ... Miss Jackson's technical virtuosity is particularly suited to a character like Hedda. Her command of her voice and her body, as well as the Jackson mannerisms, have the effect of separating the actress from the character in a very curious way."
In 1978, she starred in the romantic comedy House Calls, co-starring Walter Matthau, with the film spending two weeks at No. 1 in the US box-office rankings. House Calls was the biggest box-office hit of her career in the United States. That year, she was awarded a CBE. In 1979, she reunited with her A Touch of Class colleagues Segal and Frank for the romantic comedy Lost and Found. Jackson and Matthau teamed again in the comedy Hopscotch (1980), which debuted at No. 1 in its opening weekend at the US box office, also spending its second week in the top spot.
1980–1991: Established actor