Oscar-winning British actress Glenda Jackson, who died on Thursday aged 87, played powerful female roles before abandoning stage and screen for a career in politics where she was unafraid to speak truth to power.
When she returned to acting in her 80s, she took on a male role and one of theatre’s most challenging — that of King Lear, for which she won high praise.
Jackson’s two Oscars for best actress were decades earlier — as a temperamental young artist in “Women in Love” (1970) and a feminist in the 1973 romantic comedy “A Touch of Class”.
After 35 years in theatre and cinema, she quit to become a member of parliament for the Labour party, during years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
In both acting and politics, she compensated for her small, slight stature with what Britain’s The Independent newspaper described in 2016 as “a metal-tipped whiplash of a voice” that she used to “inflict devastating, incredulous scorn”.
“Who’s afraid of Glenda Jackson? Most people, and with some cause,” The New York Times wrote in 2019.
– Queen power –
Jackson was born on May 9, 1936, in Birkenhead, a small port town near Liverpool, northwest England, to a bricklayer and a cleaning lady.
At 16 she went to work in a chemist’s shop, doing amateur dramatics in her spare time.
When she was 18 she won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.
Jackson was recruited to the Royal Shakespeare Company, working there from 1964 to 1968, including under fabled director Peter Brook.
Among her standout roles with the company were as Ophelia in “Hamlet” and as Charlotte Corday in “Marat/Sade”, both in 1965.
In parallel she worked in cinema, being particularly successful in the early 1970s.
Besides her two Oscars during that period, Jackson won two Emmy Awards for playing Queen Elizabeth I in the hugely successful 1971 BBC television series, “Elizabeth R”.
She was the same monarch in the film “Mary, Queen of Scots”, also in 1971.
“There was the uncompromising, defiant strength she exuded in every role… She radiated a power that seemed to level her leading men,” The Independent wrote in 2018.
– Political stage –
Jackson moved seamlessly to politics, challenging Thatcher’s free-market capitalist policies that she said were destroying British society.
At the age of 55 in 1992 — two years after Thatcher was ousted and Major took over — she was elected to represent the north London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate in parliament, where she remained until 2015.
She was a junior transport minister in Tony Blair’s Labour government from 1997 to 1999, before making an unsuccessful bid to be the party’s candidate for mayor of London.
But she became a bitter opponent of Blair over the 2003 war in Iraq and among those who called on him to resign following the suicide of a defence advisor whose report was used to justify the invasion.
In one of her most…
