Glenda Jackson
Glenda May Jackson (born 9 May 1936) is an English actress and politician. She has won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice: for her role as Gudrun Brangwen in the romantic drama "Women in Love" (1970); and again for her role as Vickie Allessio in the romantic comedy "A Touch of Class" (1973). She received praise for her performances as Alex Greville in the drama film "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1971) and Elizabeth I in the BBC television serial "Elizabeth R" (1971), winning two Primetime Emmy Awards for the latter. In 2018, she won the Tony Award for  Best Actress in a Play for her role in a revival of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women", becoming one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting" in the US. Jackson took a hiatus from acting to take on a career in politics from 1992 to 2015, and was elected as the Labour Party MP for Hampstead and Highgate in the 1992 general election. She served as a junior transport minister from 1997 to 1999 during the government of Tony Blair, later becoming critical of Blair. After constituency-boundary changes, she represented Hampstead and Kilburn from  2010. In the 2010 general election, her majority of 42 votes was one of the closest results of the election. She stood down at the 2015 general election and returned to acting. Early life. Jackson was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, where her father was a builder and her mother worked in shops and as a cleaner. She was educated at West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls in nearby West Kirby, and performed in the Townswomen's Guild drama group during her teens. She worked for two years in Boots before taking up a scholarship in 1954 to study at  the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Career. 1957–1968: Early career. Jackson made her professional stage debut in Terence Rattigan's "Separate Tables" in 1957 while at RADA and appeared in repertory for the next six years. Her film debut was a bit part in the kitchen sink drama "This Sporting Life" (1963). A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for four years from 1964, she originally joined for director Peter Brook's Theatre of Cruelty season, which included Peter Weiss' "Marat/Sade" (1965), where 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. 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". 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: Film and television. 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 U.S.; the anonymous reviewer in "Variety" wrote of the two principals, "Their performances are more dramatically bombastic than sympathetic, or sometimes even believable." 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 and a BAFTA Award for her role in John Schlesinger's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (both 1971). That year, British exhibitors voted her the 6th most popular star at the British box office. In 1971, Jackson made the first of several appearances with Morecambe and Wise. 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 an information film for the Blood Transfusion Service. Filmmaker Melvin Frank saw Jackson's comedy skills on 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, for which Jackson won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She continued to work in the theatre, returning to the RSC for the lead in 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 scored box office success in the United States in the romantic comedy "House Calls," co-starring Walter Matthau. 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 was a mild success . For her 1980 appearance on "The Muppet Show", Jackson told the producers she would perform any material they liked. In her appearance, she has a delusion that she is a pirate captain who hijacks the Muppet Theatre as her ship. 1980–1992: Later acting career. Fifteen years after the New York engagement of "Marat/Sade", Jackson returned to Broadway in Andrew Davies's "Rose" opposite Jessica Tandy; both received Tony nominations. In 1985, she appeared as Nina Leeds in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Strange Interlude" at the Nederlander Theatre in a production which had originated in London the previous  year and ran for eight weeks. John Beaufort for "The Christian Science Monitor" wrote: "Bravura is the inevitable word for Miss Jackson's display of feminine wiles and brilliant technique." Frank Rich in "The New York Times" thought Jackson, "with her helmet of hair and gashed features," when Leeds is a young woman, "looks like a cubist portrait of Louise Brooks," and later when the character has aged several decades, is "mesmerizing as a Zelda Fitzgeraldesque neurotic, a rotting and spiteful middle-aged matron and, finally, a spent, sphinx-like widow happily embracing extinction." Herbert Wise directed a British television  version of O'Neill's drama which was first broadcast in the US as part of PBS's "American Playhouse" in January 1988. In November 1984, Jackson appeared in the title role of Robert David MacDonald's English translation of Racine's "Phèdre", titled "Phedra", at The Old Vic. The play was designed and directed by Philip Prowse, and Robert Eddison played Theramenes. "The Daily Telegraph"'s John Barber wrote of her performance, "Wonderfully impressive... The actress finds a voice as jagged and hoarse as her torment". Benedict Nightingale in the "New Statesman" was intrigued that Jackson didn't go in  for nobility, but played Racine's feverish queen as if to say that "being skewered in the guts by Cupid is an ugly, bitter, humiliating business". The costume which Prowse designed for Jackson's performance is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and iconic photographs of Jackson in the role can be found online. In 1989, Jackson appeared in Ken Russell's "The Rainbow", playing Anna Brangwen, mother of Gudrun, the part which had won her her first Academy Award twenty years earlier. Also in that year, she played Martha in a Los Angeles production of Edward Albee's "Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at the Doolittle Theatre (now the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre). Directed by the playwright himself, this staging featured John Lithgow as George. Dan Sullivan in the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that Jackson and Lithgow performed "with the assurance of dedicated character assassins, not your hire-and-salary types" with the actors being able to display their character's capacity for antipathy. Albee was disappointed with this production, pointing to Jackson who he thought "had retreated back to the thing she can do very well, that ice cold performance. I don't know whether she got scared , but in rehearsal she was being Martha, and the closer we got to opening the less Martha she was!" She performed the lead role in Howard Barker's "Scenes from an Execution" as Galactia, a sixteenth century female Venetian artist, at the Almeida Theatre in 1990. It was an adaptation of Barker's 1984 radio play in which Jackson had played the same role. 1992–2015: Political career. Jackson retired from acting in order to stand for election to the House of Commons in the 1992 general election, subsequently becoming the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate. She has stated that  she felt Britain was being "destroyed" by the policies of Thatcher and the Conservative government, so that she was willing to do "anything that was legal" to oppose her. Jackson joined the Labour front bench as shadow transport minister in July 1996. Following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, she was appointed as a junior minister in the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, with responsibility for transport in London. She resigned from the post in 1999 before an unsuccessful attempt to be nominated as the Labour Party candidate for the election of the first Mayor of London  in 2000. In the 2005 general election, she received 14,615 votes, representing 38.29% of the votes cast in the constituency. As a high-profile backbencher, she became a regular critic of Blair over his plans to introduce higher education tuition fees in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. She also called for him to resign following the Judicial Enquiry by Lord Hutton in 2003 surrounding the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the death of government adviser Dr. David Kelly. Jackson was generally considered to be a traditional left-winger, often disagreeing with the dominant Blairite governing Third Way  faction in the Labour Party. Jackson is also a republican. By October 2005, her disagreements with Blair's leadership swelled to a point where she threatened to challenge the Prime Minister as a stalking horse candidate in a leadership contest if he did not stand down within a reasonable amount of time. On 31 October 2006, Jackson was one of 12 Labour MPs to back Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party's call for an inquiry into the Iraq War. Her constituency boundaries changed for the 2010 general election. The Gospel Oak and Highgate wards became part of Holborn  & St Pancras, and the new Hampstead & Kilburn constituency switched into Brent to include Brondesbury, Kilburn and Queens Park wards (from the old Brent East and Brent South seats). On 6 May 2010, Jackson was elected as the MP for the new Hampstead and Kilburn constituency with a margin of 42 votes over Conservative Chris Philp, with the Liberal Democrat candidate Edward Fordham less than a thousand votes behind them. She had the second closest result and thus second smallest majority of any MP in the 2010 election. In June 2011, Jackson announced that, presuming the Parliament elected in 2010 lasted  until 2015, she would not seek re-election. She stated: "I will be almost 80 and by then it will be time for someone else to have a turn." The eventual election was held two days before her 79th birthday. In April 2013, Jackson gave a speech in parliament following the death of Margaret Thatcher. She accused Thatcher of treating "vices as virtues" and stated that, because of Thatcherism, the UK was susceptible to unprecedented unemployment rates and homelessness. Another speech of Jackson's went viral in June 2014 when she gave a scathing assessment of Iain Duncan Smith's  tenure as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, telling him that he was responsible for the "destruction of the welfare state and the total and utter incompetence of his department". 2015–present: Return to acting. In 2015, Jackson returned to acting following a 23-year absence, having retired from politics. She took the role of Dide, the ancient matriarch, in a series of Radio 4 plays, "Blood, Sex and Money", based on a series of novels by Émile Zola. She returned to the stage at the end of 2016, playing the title role in William Shakespeare's "King Lear  at the Old Vic Theatre in London, in a production running from 25 October to 3 December. Jackson was nominated for Best Actress at the Olivier Awards for her role, but ultimately lost out to Billie Piper. She did, however, win the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress at the 2017 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performance. Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph" wrote, "Glenda Jackson is tremendous as King Lear. No ifs, no buts. In returning to the stage at the age of 80, 25 years after her last performance (as the Clytemnestra-like Christine in Eugene O'Neill’s  Mourning Becomes Electra at the Glasgow Citizens), she has pulled off one of those 11th-hour feats of human endeavour that will surely be talked about for years to come by those who see it." In 2018, Jackson returned to Broadway in a revival of Edward Albee’s "Three Tall Women", winning the 2018 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. Marilyn Stasio of "Variety" wrote, "Watching Glenda Jackson in theatrical flight is like looking straight into the sun. Her expressive face registers her thoughts while guarding her feelings. But it's the voice that really thrills. Deeply pitched  and clarion clear, it's the commanding voice of stern authority. Don't mess with this household god or she'll turn you to stone." Jackson returned to the role of King Lear on Broadway in a production that opened in April 2019. Director Sam Gold describes her portrayal of Lear in "The New York Times Magazine" : "She is going to go through something most people don't go through. You're all invited. Glenda Jackson is going to endure this, and you're going to witness it." In 2019, after a 27-year absence, Jackson returned to television drama , portraying an elderly grandmother struggling with dementia in "Elizabeth Is Missing" on BBC One, based on the novel of the same name by Emma Healey, for which she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress and International Emmy Award for Best Actress. Personal life. Jackson was married to Roy Hodges from 1958 until their divorce in 1976. They had a son, Dan Hodges (born 1969), who is now a newspaper columnist and former Labour Party adviser and commentator. Jackson was five months pregnant when filming on "Women in Love" was completed.