An illustrious figure in British theater, twice Oscar winner for roles of women with disturbing eroticism, she devoted the same ardor to her long career as a Labor MP.
British actress Glenda Jackson, who won two Oscars before devoting herself to politics in the Labor Party, has died at the age of 87, her agent announced Thursday, June 15. She had just shot a new film with Michael Caine, he said, confirming his return to comedy after years spent in politics.
A bold life
At 80 and after 23 years of absence, this slender brunette with large hands was thus back on the boards in 2016, playing King Lear, the role of male consecration in the theater. She won a Tony Award on Broadway two years later. “Who’s Afraid of Glenda Jackson? Most People and for Good Reason”, wrote the New York Times in 2019.
Ken Russel’s muse, she won her first Oscar in 1970 for Love, adaptation of the audacious novel by DH Lawrence on the passionate relationship between two sisters and their lovers. In 1973, it was with comedy A mistress in the arms, a woman on the back (A touch of class in original version) that she won her second statuette thanks to her composition of a divorced woman trapped in an impossible love with a married man.
From Birkenhead, a small port opposite Liverpool, where she was born on May 9, 1936, she had kept a suburban accent and a desire to succeed. Daughter of a bricklayer and a housekeeper, she first worked as an employee in a pharmacy and took drama lessons for amateurs. Despite the lack of family support, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and went on tour.
Sulphurous roles between theater and cinema
This is how director Peter Brook spotted her and hired her in 1963 to play his Ophelia in Hamlet. The following year, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and stood out in the play Marat/Sade. She plays a demented Charlotte Corday whipping Marat with her long hair in an asylum where the protagonists of the French Revolution are interned. The fiery actress is only 26 years old. The play was acclaimed on Broadway two years later.
After her first Oscar, her different femininity and her magnetism continue to burst the screen: in The pathetic symphony (1970, Ken Russell), she plays the wife of a homosexual Tchaikovsky who ends up as a shaved nymphomaniac in a psychiatric hospital. In A Sunday like any other (1971, John Schlesinger), she finds herself sharing her lover with a New York doctor in a very daring bisexual triangle for the time.
Minister of Transport
After 35 years of career in theater and cinema, she goes into politics to fight Margaret Thatcher whom she accuses of destroying British society. Elected in 1992 as a Labor MP for the London suburbs, she kept her constituency until 2015 and distinguished herself by her particular attention to “poor, unemployed and sick”.
Appointed as Minister of Transport in the government of Tony Blair from 1997 to 1999, she became a fierce opponent after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Customary of theatrical tirades in Parliament, she had, as a funeral eulogy to the Iron Lady, declared in her deep and scathing voice: “A female prime minister, yes. But a woman? Certainly not for me.”