Glenda Jackson dead: Two-time Oscar-winner dies at age 87

Jordan Hoffman
·4 min read
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Glenda Jackson, the British actress who hit the snooze bar on her acting career for a 23-year career in politics, died on Thursday, as per her representatives. During her peak years in the 1970s and 80s, she won two Oscars (and was nominated for two more) and two Emmy Awards. She was nominated for four Tony Awards, finally winning one in 2018 after a late-in-life career resurgence. She was 87 years old.

Jackson, whose father was a bricklayer and whose mother was a barmaid and domestic, studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was told by the academy’s principal that, due to her looks, she would likely only find work as a character actress, and she shouldn’t depend on getting jobs after 40.

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This proved to be the opposite of true. Her big break came when experimental theater director Peter Brook cast her in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s groundbreaking adaptation of “Marat/Sade.” The show transferred to Paris and New York (where she was nominated for a Tony) and was adapted for film. She continued to work with the RSC through the 1960s, including the role of Ophelia in Peter Hall’s production of “Hamlet” opposite David Warner. 

In 1969, she starred in Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” which was at the vanguard of British cinema. It is best remembered, no doubt, for a lengthy naked wrestling sequence between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, a bit of a breakthrough for British censors. Jackson’s big scene is doing some interpretive dance in front of a herd of cattle. Though shot in 1968, it did not come out in the U.S. until 1970. Jackson won that year’s Academy Award for Best Actress for the part, beating out Jane Alexander, Ali MacGraw, Sarah Miles, and Carrie Snodgrass.

She soon reteamed with Russell for “The Music Lovers,” an unorthodox musical biopic about Tchaikovsky (she plays Tchaikovsky’s wife, but there’s a lot more to it than that). Her next big project was “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” John Schlesinger’s melodrama in which Jackson is in the middle of an inclusive love triangle with Peter Finch and Murray Head. This was a revolutionary film in that its attitude toward same-sex relationships was, for its time, somewhat progressive. Jackson was again nominated for an Oscar.

Meanwhile, on television, Jackson shaved her head and starred in “Elizabeth R,” a six-part series about Queen Elizabeth I. The British import was one of the first major successes of PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre,” and Jackson won two Emmys for the role. 

In 1973, Jackson won her second Oscar for “A Touch of Class,” a romantic comedy opposite George Segal. Two years later came her final Oscar nomination, for an adaptation of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” from director Trevor Nunn. Soon thereafter she starred opposite Walter Matthau in two successful comedies, “House Calls” and “Hopscotch.” (The latter of which is one of the great gems of the era.)

Of note, Jackson did not appear to accept either of her Oscars in person. Juliet Mills accepted on her behalf the first time, and producer Melvin Frank did the second time. 

In 1991, Jackson told her agent to take her off the call sheets, and she entered the world of politics. She was elected to parliament, part of the Labour Party, and maintained a position in the party’s left wing. She became a minister of transport in Tony Blair’s government but broke with him during the invasion of Iraq. She famously delivered a speech after the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher that, well, wasn’t exactly reverential in tone. As the Associated Press put it, “Jackson’s blunt manner and outspokenness continued throughout her political career, and may have helped keep her from high government office.”

She left politics in 2015 and returned to the theater. Her first big production was at the Old Vic in London, playing the lead in “King Lear,” which transferred to Broadway. Her 2018 turn in the revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” won her the Tony.  

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