Obituary: Glenda Jackson: outstanding, ferocious presence in theatre and on screen

Born: May 9th, 1936

Died: June 15th, 2023

Many leading British actors have mixed art and politics, but no great actor ever made such a decisive break from one to the other as Glenda Jackson, when she was elected Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate in 1992. For the previous 30 years, she had been an outstanding, ferocious presence in theatre and on screen.

Jackson was “an archetypal spotty teenager who suffered the tortures of the damned because I wasn’t like those girls in the magazines”, and she never tampered with her imperfectly aligned teeth; for her legion of admirers, such honesty redoubled her sensuality.

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And there was a deep-seated unhappiness about her that she could always turn to dramatic advantage. “When I have to cry,” she once said, “I think about my love life. And when I have to laugh, I think about my love life.” The American director Charles Marowitz said: “It was always the sense of being close to elemental forces that accounted for Glenda’s fascination; the knowledge that she is capable of manifesting those potent inner states, that in most of us remain contained or suppressed.”

She was born in Birkenhead, then in Cheshire, now in Merseyside, the eldest of four daughters of Harry Jackson, a bricklayer, and his wife, Joan (née Pearce), a cleaner, moving soon afterwards to the coastal village of Hoylake. Her family was distinctly matriarchal, a fact compounded by the absence of Harry for six years during the second World War, serving on minesweepers.

Glenda was educated at Holy Trinity Church of England primary school in Hoylake and West Kirby grammar school for girls, where she became, by all accounts, sullen and introverted. She did badly in her exams and, aged 16, took a job in the local Boots pharmacy, a stultifying experience.

A developing interest in the cinema, a school visit to see Donald Wolfit as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at the Liverpool Empire, and a brush with amateur dramatics led her to audition for Rada in London in 1954; she began studying there in January 1955, financed by a discretionary award from Cheshire education committee. She was one of the first wave of students going against the grain of the old-style “finishing school” Rada in the wake of the arrival of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and Alan Bates.

On graduating, she acquired an agent, Peter Crouch, and worked in repertory theatres in Worthing and Hornchurch, making her London debut in All Kinds of Men at the Arts theatre in September 1957, followed by a six-month season at Crewe, where she met and married the stage manager, Roy Hodges. Further seasons at the Dundee Rep and the Lyric Hammersmith led to a West End debut in Bill Naughton’s Alfie (transferring from the Mermaid) as one of John Neville’s girlfriends.

Peter Brook bowed to the insistence of his colleague Marowitz in hiring Jackson for the RSC’s notorious Theatre of Cruelty season at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) in 1964, an experimental project using improvisation based on the theories of the mad genius Antonin Artaud, and other psychological exercises, leading to “club” performances (to bypass censorship by the lord chamberlain’s office): in one of them, Jackson was stripped naked and dressed in prison clothes while a report on Christine Keeler (of Profumo affair notoriety) was read out; she was later transformed into Jackie Kennedy.

In an intense few seasons with the RSC between 1964 and 1966, she secured her reputation for danger and pent-up savagery in Brecht’s masterpiece Puntila, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (playing all the woman witnesses at Auschwitz, with Penelope Keith), and then David Warner’s Hamlet; her electrifying Ophelia had all the qualities needed, said Penelope Gilliatt in the Observer, to play the role.

Most controversially, she appeared in two landmark Brook productions (later filmed by him), Marat/Sade (1965), in which she played a psychotic Charlotte Corday, whipping the bath-bound Marat with her long hair; and US (1966), a quietly enraged, inquisitive response to the Vietnam War, and how we might deal with it on our own doorstep.

She was one of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (alongside Avril Elgar and Marianne Faithfull) in William Gaskill’s fine production of Edward Bond’s translation at the Royal Court in 1967, and then her film career (which had started in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life, with Richard Harris, in 1963) really took off: she won two Oscars before she even set foot in Hollywood, for her brilliant performances in Russell’s DH Lawrence fantasia Women in Love (1969), and Melvin Frank’s delightful romcom A Touch of Class (1973), revealing an unsuspected talent for bitchy high comedy as a divorced fashion designer in a hectic affair with Segal.

These years can now be seen as the pinnacle of her career: an amazing performance over six different episodes of Elizabeth R (1971) on BBC television, ageing from 16 to 69, ending with a parched, cracked face, and two Emmy awards in the US; another Russell histrionic special, The Music Lovers (1971), in which she famously writhed naked on the floor of a train compartment to the sounds of Tchaikovsky; yet another take on the Virgin Queen in a recreation of Friedrich Schiller’s fictional encounter between Elizabeth and her cousin Mary Stuart in Charles Jarrott’s Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), opposite Vanessa Redgrave; a tranquil wartime drama in Michael Apted’s The Triple Echo (1972), based on an HE Bates novel; and a finely poised Lady Hamilton in James Cellan Jones’s Bequest to the Nation (1973) by Terence Rattigan.

That film reunited her with Peter Finch, with whom she had starred in John Schlesinger’s pioneering, grown-up look at bisexuality in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), written by Gilliatt. Jackson, in fine fettle as a divorced businesswoman, shared her beefcake lover (Murray Head) with Finch’s conflicted gay doctor.

Two stage performances, in Jean Genet’s The Maids at Greenwich in 1974, with Susannah York, and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, directed by Trevor Nunn at the RSC in 1975, were also filmed. Jackson’s Hedda was so withering and scornful, you wondered how she had lasted one night of the honeymoon, let alone six months.

Hedda’s volatility and confusion carried through to Jackson’s private life as she embarked on a tempestuous affair – it would last six and a half years, on and off – with the show’s lighting designer, Andy Phillips (who had been an electrician on the Marat/Sade at the RSC). This ended her marriage to Hodges and propelled her through a couple of indifferent Hollywood romcoms (House Calls with Matthau in 1978, Lost and Found, with Segal again, in 1979) and a mixed bunch of stage shows, one of which, Bond’s version of the Jacobean masterpiece The White Devil at the Old Vic in 1976, signalled the launch and instant demise of a Jackson/Phillips production company.

With her Hollywood status in decline she unexpectedly surfaced in 1982 in the West End as Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, in Robert David MacDonald’s witty conversation piece Summit Conference (first seen at the Glasgow Citizens in 1978).

Her involvement with, and admiration for, the Citizens theatre under Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse led to her final decade of outstanding theatre work: in London, she appeared in Strauss’s Great and Small (1983) and O’Neill’s five-hour Strange Interlude (1984), directed by the Citizens alumnus Keith Hack, before linking with Prowse on a sensational Phèdre at the Old Vic; this tumultuous performance was the Cleopatra that went missing and certainly her most terrifying work since Marat/Sade.

Then, as a ferociously authoritarian widow shutting up her five daughters in an Andalucían village, she led the Spanish director Núria Espert’s wonderful revival of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (translated by David MacDonald), alongside Joan Plowright, at the Globe (now the Gielgud) in 1986.

From this glorious platform, facing new challenges, she was ready for anything. But the world was changing. The roles, too, were drying up. She had no intention, she said, of hanging around to play the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet: “Life’s too short.” Her biographer, the Labour MP Chris Bryant, said that until Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Jackson had not regarded herself as a political actor, in the way Jane Fonda or Redgrave did. She had long been a Labour Party member, and gave time and energy to single-issue campaigns, such as human rights, Oxfam and abortion.

She considered standing for parliament. Her last hurrah was a typically ebullient and uncompromising performance as the Renaissance painter Galactia in Barker’s Scenes from an Execution at the Almeida in 1990 (she had first played the role on radio in 1984), followed by Prowse’s revival of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children at the Citizens in Glasgow (seen briefly at the Mermaid); she was loud, brassy, wolfish, pugnacious, resilient and scornful – “God help her opponents in the House of Commons, should she get there,” I wrote at the time.

Although her friend Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader, tried to dissuade her from standing in 1992, on the grounds that she was a great actor first and a Labour Party member second, he acknowledged her determination and swung his electioneering machine behind her. Despite the overall Labour debacle in losing to John Major, she achieved a swing of twice the national average, proving, in her early career at Westminster, as popular a new “celebrity” MP as were Sebastian Coe and Gyles Brandreth on the Tory side.

In 1997, re-elected in the Tony Blair landslide, she served briefly as a junior transport minister, but she became an increasingly critical voice on her own side, especially over the Iraq War.

She left politics and made a surprise return to acting in 2015, making waves in a BBC Radio 4 series based on the novels of Emile Zola.

She returned to Broadway in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women in 2018, winning a Tony award, and reprised her Lear in New York in 2019. Latterly she played an elderly grandmother with dementia to perfection in a BBC television drama, Elizabeth Is Missing, winning a third Emmy.