Glenda Jackson is a British actress and politician.
Background
Jackson, Glenda was born on May 9, 1936 in Birkenhead, Cheshire. Daughter of Harry and Joan Jackson. She was the daughter of a contractor, and she bristles with a politicized social worker’s antieloquence, biting at her listeners. Her manner is faintly aggrieved, as if to relax might involve forgiving essential resentments.
Education
She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963.
Career
On stage, she was Charlotte Cordav in Marat/Sade; Masha in Three Sisters: the voice of haranguing rebuke in US; a sex-mad Joan of Arc in Henry VI; and an Ophelia so managing that one critic, Penelope Gilliatt, thought she was readv to play the Prince.
Her movie career began with a small part in This Sporting Life (63, Lindsay Anderson); Charlotte Corday again in the film of Marat/Sade (66. Peter Brook); Negatives (68, Peter Medak); an Oscar for Women in Love (70, Ken Russell); Sunday, Bloody Sunday (71, John Schlesinger), scripted by Penelope Gilliatt; The Music Lovers (71, Russell); Many, Queen of Scots (71, Charles Jarrott), as Queen Elizabeth, a part she played with great success on a BBC TV series, Elizabeth R: The Triple Echo (72, Michael Apted); another Oscar for A Touch of Cdass (72, Melvin Frank), her first comedy; as Emma Hamilton in Bequest to the Nation (73, James Cellan Jones); as a nun in The Tempest (74, Damiano Damiani); in a film of Genet’s The Maids (74, Christopher Miles); The Romantic Englishwoman (75, Joseph Losey); Hedda (75, Trevor Nunn) from Ibsen’s Hcdda Gabler; halfway to Hamlet, playing Bernhardt in The Incredible Sarah (76, Richard Fleischer); as the Nixon nun in Nasty Habits (76, Michael Lindsay-Hogg); and trying acid romance again in House Calls (78, Howard Zieff). She played the eccentric English poet in Stevie (78, Robert Enders); the teacher in The Class of Miss MacMichael (78, Silvio Narizzano); and Lost and Found (79, Melvin Frank).
She played with Walter Matthau in Hopscotch (80, Ronald Neame); H E A L TH. (80, Robert Altman); as the actress afflicted by a stroke in The Patricia Neal Story (81, Anthony Haney and Anthony Page); The Return of the Soldier (82, Alan Bridges); as a documentary filmmaker in Giro City (82, Karl Francis); as Elena Bonner in Sakharov (84, Jack Gold); Turtle Diary (85, John Irvin); Beyond Therapy (86, Altman); Business as Usual (87, Lezli-An Barrett); Salome’s Last Dance (88, Russell); as the mother to the character she played in Women in Love in The Rainbow (88, Russell); Doombeach (89, Colin Finbow); and King of the Wind (90, Peter Duffell).
In Britain’s 1992 General Election, she was returned to the House of Commons as Labour AFP. for Hampstead.
Membership
Royal Shakespeare Company where roles included Ophelia in Hamlet and Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade (in London and New York).
Personality
Not even two Oscars ever softened the abrasive edge of Glenda Jackson's militant intelligence, or gave it more understanding. She is a good illustration of stage authority seeming aggressive to the camera. We have so few actresses brave enough to scorn charm, it seems rash to chide her rarity. But she bullied with seriousness, and her calculated comedies reveal no true lightness. So many floridly worthy parts and her gruff Englishness have helped disguise her doctrinaire flatness as a screen presence. She looks tense and deter-mined, and only the palpable sense of strain has accounted for the respect in which some people hold her.