Glenda Jackson: Fierce and Singular to the Very End

The idea of dying while at work, on stage, seemed “pretentious,” the actor Glenda Jackson once told this reporter, laughing. It reminded her of the story of Laurence Olivier saying to fellow actor Sybil Thorndike that he thought he was going to die during a performance.

“One way to see it is that it’s a wonderful way to go,” said Jackson. “The other is: how unprofessional.” She laughed. “I prefer to go with the latter, I bloody do.”

As it was, Jackson died Thursday at home in Blackheath, southeast London, aged 87, after a brief illness with her family at her side. Her agent Lionel Larner said she had recently completed filming The Great Escaper, alongside Michael Caine.

Tony Nominee Glenda Jackson on Awards, Jeremy Corbyn, Anti-Semitism, and Dancing With Fred Astaire

Mortality was central to both the characters of King Lear and 'A' in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women—the last two roles Jackson played on Broadway in 2019 and 2018 respectively. Did Jackson share the preoccupation, this reporter asked her. “Sometimes I do. I think have accepted it’s going to happen. But you just have to make sure that when you go you've ‘left it tidy,’ if you know what I mean, so whoever is left doesn’t get sucked into that terrible ‘Should we do this, should we do that?’ thing.”

Both her parents died suddenly (her father had been ill), with no family with them when they died. “It’s the thing you dread—that the call comes in at that moment you aren’t at the hospital,” Jackson said. The only thing my mother said was ‘I don't want to end up in a pauper’s grave.’ As if we’d have left her in a bloody pauper’s grave.”

A two-time Oscar winner turned British M.P. turned actor again, Jackson told The Daily Beast that it was “the icing on the cake for doing a play with the caliber of actresses I work alongside,” when she was nominated for her fifth Tony Award in 2018, playing A in Three Tall Women. She went on to win the award. (She was not nominated for her Lear a year later.)

Jackson won her Oscars for Women in Love (1970), and A Touch of Class (1973), and, until 2018, had most recently been nominated for a Tony in 1988 for Hamlet. From 1992 to 2015 she gave up acting to become a Labour M.P. Her return to the London stage came in 2016, playing Lear.

Told it was her fifth Tony nomination, Jackson, then 81, said, “Is it really? My God. I didn’t know that. I always jib at the idea of winning. It sounds as if we overtly compete in some way. We don't, so the winners are those who vote for those who win the award in the end. I’m not competitive in that area. I am quite competitive with myself.”

Would she attend the awards, this reporter asked. After all, she did not turn up to accept either of her Oscars. “I think so, yes,” Jackson said as if I had asked about how much she was looking forward to an upcoming dental appointment. “I think you’re expected to, and you've got to eat.”

You don’t sound very keen on the idea, this reporter said. “As I’ve had occasion to say before, I’m a pretty anti-sociable Socialist,” Jackson replied.

Of being nominated in the same category as Amy Schumer (for her role in Meteor Shower), Jackson said, “I’ve seen her on the telly. She’s very funny.”

Jackson then asked which Tony category she had been nominated in.

“Oh well, there you go,” she said in a fairly uninterested tone when told it was a Lead Actress in a Play. “I knew what the categories were. I wasn't aware of the definitions.”

When asked if she was going to celebrate her nomination, Jackson said brusquely, but with a gently guttural laugh: “I beg your pardon. I’ve got a performance tonight.”

“Acting is not a game”

A friend told Jackson that when she returned to acting after 23 years away, it would be like riding a bike. “I said it was rather more complicated than that,” she told this reporter. “What I love is the camaraderie of theater: everything is focused on getting the play as best as it can be done.”

Albee was tricky, she said, as he used simple words, but differently in different sentences.

“Acting is not a game,” Jackson said sternly. We are not playing at playing.”

It was my second meeting with Jackson; the first had taken place almost 20 years previously when at a market in her Hampstead and Highgate constituency some stallholders challenged her, and she gave it right back to them. In New York, over coffee (her) and tea (me), we discussed the Tony Awards, her life in acting and her career in politics as a British Labour M.P., the lack of good roles for women on stage, and much more.

She was very candid—about why she felt the Labour Party did not have a specific anti-Semitism problem, but should deal with whatever issues it does have head-on, the unlikelihood as she saw it of a Jeremy Corbyn prime ministership (she was right about that), the disaster of Brexit, growing up in Birkenhead (like this author’s mother), and acting in the nude for director Ken Russell while champagne bottles and metal suitcases rained down on her.

Her accent still tinged with the inflections of her native Birkenhead in the northwest of England, she scoffed at the notion of a Tony Award nomination. A year later, in 2019, she would win a BAFTA award for playing a woman with Alzheimer’s in the film Elizabeth is Missing.

“You don't do a play to compete for an award,” Jackson told me. “This was the argument I always had over the Oscars. I didn’t win them. They were given to me. All I did was two films. People always say the analogy is Olympic gold medals. Bullshit, it isn’t. With an Olympic medal, you all start at the same point, go the same distance, and the first person to cross the finish line wins. You work all your lives for that 30 seconds. It's not quite the same thing in my profession.”

Did awards mean anything to her?

“I wouldn't have thought so. Every performance you give is the first time you’ve done it. You've not played to that audience before. It is always, in that sense, a work in progress. The best teacher is an audience. The ideal performance is when that group of strangers sitting in the dark gets energy from the group in the light, and sends energy back to us. When it really works a perfect circle is formed.”

When Jackson won an Oscar for A Touch of Class, she had "no intention" of going to the ceremony, but she was on tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company performing Hedda Gabler, so she went to an after-party.

“The big thing for me that night was that I met Fred Astaire. I couldn't believe it when I went to the party afterwards. He came up, I’m going…” She makes a fluttery sound of someone with nerves. Astaire approached her as the band was playing.

“He said, ‘I can’t do ballroom dancing.’ I said, ‘I can’t either.'”

Jackson, often so serious and occasionally furious, was smiling wistfully at the memory.

The idea of Glenda Jackson starstruck seemed a surprise, I said.

“Oh, Fred Astaire! Come on! My fantasy is that I’m the best dancing partner he never had. I think I would have been marvelous with him, but there you go. You cannot do everything in this life, but you can try.”

Was she really that down on the Tonys? “You don't do acting for that," she said, quickly, then smiled. "To be entirely honest, I didn't know there were so many awards in New York. Every day there seems to be an award for something. I’m trying to think about the last time I was nominated (1988, Hamlet). I had my photograph taken with Elizabeth Taylor. She and (Richard) Burton came to see it. She was actually very shy. And sweet. She knew how to connect. She was a human being first and foremost. The work she did for AIDS was just magnificent, the way she did it.”

This reporter asked which other stars Jackson had met on her travels. "Rock Hudson. He was an absolute human being. Charming, funny, real. None of that ‘I’m a star’ shit, he was lovely.”

Jackson also loved meeting Bette Davis. “She was absolutely what I expected her to be. She didn’t disappoint in any way. She was marvelous, funny, bitchy. I mean there was no question who she was and you all knew it and so you should. The essential thing about stars is that they are human beings. All that external crap doesn’t really affect them.”

“I have never been a star,” Jackson said emphatically, as if she had never heard anything so stupid. “Nobody ever goes to see me for me.”

That's absurd, this reporter said. Of course people are coming to see ‘Glenda Jackson.’

Jackson would not hear of it. “People are usually very disappointed when they meet me, which I can understand because I’m very boring. I’m very dull. I absolutely lead an absolutely normal, ordinary, unremarkable life in every way. That's the way I like to live. They come to see me do what I do, and that's a different kettle of fish. Nobody comes to see me to be me. I haven’t got anything to sell. Good God, what have I got? Nowt.”

“I think it’s much harder for female playwrights”

Many speak of how intimidating Jackson was, which was not the full truth of her personality. True, she was combative and did not suffer any she perceived as fools. She challenged you if she did not agree with how a question was phrased, but she was not personally scornful. She used “bloody” a fair bit. She was direct. She occasionally gesticulated or thumped the table to underscore a point. There was no wishy-washiness to her opinions. You want vinegar? She had sachets of it to spare.

Jackson recalled meeting voters in her constituency who would say either, “I like your acting but don't like your politics,” or, “I like your politics but don't like your acting.” She's entirely used to dividing opinion. She expects to.

Jackson stoutly defended the presence of celebrities in politics. “They have the right to vote. Why should they not be allowed to speak out about things? Anything I could have done to have gotten Margaret Thatcher and her government out and was legal, I was prepared to do.”

Jackson decided to become an M.P. having been enraged by Thatcher’s infamous quote that “There is no such thing as society,” that “I almost walked into a closed set of French windows.”

Jackson's speech in Parliament after Thatcher's death in 2013 remains one of her most memorable.

Jackson's guiding principle in politics and on the stage is, as E.M. Forster had it, “Only connect.”

The other day a woman outside a Duane Reade in her neighborhood had approached Jackson and told her she had come to see Three Tall Women and been incredibly moved by it. “And her eyes filled with tears, and you think, ‘Bugger me, that’s pretty amazing.’”

Jackson was less misty-eyed when it comes to the lack of scope in theatre for female actors and playwrights.

“I do wonder why contemporary dramatists find female characters so uninteresting, why we are never or rarely ever the driving force of anything. It's a fantasy to say there’s been a change. Whenever I say this, somebody says to disprove my point, ‘So and so is writing this.’ That's not the point. The point is I don’t know why creative, contemporary dramatists don't find us (women) interesting. That has never changed in all the years I’ve been working. Never.”

Three Tall Women had been a blast, Jackson said, because she got to work with two other actresses; she was equally fortunate performing The House of Bernarda Alba and The Maids.

“If it’s a woman’s part, it’s usually only one,” Jackson said. “I don't know why they don't find us interesting, but they don't. They definitely don't. I think it’s much harder for female playwrights. They’re expected to have a political flag to fly, which I think is unfair. If they’re in the field of comedy, they don’t have to do it up to a point… It ain’t equal by any means.”

“To work with Ken Russell, my God what a privilege”

Acting was not a cherished dream growing up—“Good God, no. Not at all. Ever.”

Jackson was the oldest of four daughters. She recalled her father Harry, a builder, knocking on the front door of a friend if she was one minute past her 10 p.m. curfew. She had to take her younger siblings wherever she went and later accused her mother, Joan, a house cleaner and barmaid. of giving her “an over-developed sense of responsibility” too soon.

She could never do anything by herself, and those were the days when a close-knit neighborhood meant that if you tried to play truant from school or were somewhere you shouldn’t be, it would be reported, pronto, straight to your parents.

“Certainly, it came to me, later, that there was more to life than I was experiencing and I had more to offer than was being asked of me.”

A friend she worked alongside in Boots (a British pharmacy chain) was an amateur actor and encouraged Jackson to join the group she attended. There, someone encouraged Jackson to pursue acting professionally (that person's daughter later wrote to Jackson to say how proud her mother would have been to see Jackson’s ascent through the profession).

Then-Cheshire County Council funded Jackson through the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, though her parents were not happy. “My mother thought she’d never see me again, that I’d be sold to white slavers. My father was more sanguine. They came to see me when I was doing rep in Crewe. My character disappeared with a male character into a garden and didn’t re-emerge until well into the second act. My dad was saying to my mum all that time, ‘What are they doing in that bloody garden?’”

Her parents were sanguine about her success. “When I used to go home I was fine if I didn't have holes in my shoes.”

In 1964, her break came when she joined Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Company. Her first Tony nomination came in 1967 for her role as Charlotte Corday in his production of Marat/Sade. She won an Emmy for her iconic role as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth R (1971).

Theater was “difficult, and so it was interesting,” she said of acting on stage. Did she mean pretending to be somebody else?

“That's not what it is. You have to get off that,” snapped Jackson. She meant achieving that connection between the audience and the actors. She was once performing in an anti-Vietnam War play in London, which ended with a butterfly being symbolically set alight.

One night, a woman from the audience came onto the stage and stopped the action. The play had affected her so much she wanted to make clear that people could do something to protest the conflict.

Of course, there have been times when the plays have not connected, such as the time when—Jackson recalled laughing—a woman said from the stalls during one performance, “Well, that’s not very good acting, with your back to the audience.”

Acting in Ken Russell’s films bought Jackson fame (and her first Oscar for Women in Love). “To work with him, my God, what a privilege,” she said. “It’s absolutely disgraceful the way the British film industry virtually ignored him. He broke the envelope for British film. Up to then it had been excessively parochial. He just tore it apart. He had a third eye, he saw underneath things.”

The explicit sex and sexuality in Russell's films didn’t bother Jackson.

“You always had people on set on those days who weren’t usually there,” she said, laughing. While filming The Music Lovers (1970), Jackson recalled, she had to lie down naked on the ground, on what was supposed to be the floor of a train carriage that male stagehands were rocking side to side. An ice bucket and champagne bottle fell on top of her, and smashed.

“Wipe her off, wipe her off, she’s not bleeding, she’s all right,” cried Russell.

Metal suitcases fell on her next.

“Come on, come on. If she’s bruised, it’s not going to show,” cried Russell.

Eventually, a male cameraman was placed in her lap to get the desired shots. “I'm a married man,” he reassured her.

Jackson said she has not been a victim of sexual abuse or harassment. “But nobody ever hired me for the way I looked. But did you know that two women die every week in the UK at the hands of a male? I don’t find that on the front page of every newspaper.”

Regarding the Harvey Weinstein scandal and other #MeToo flashpoints, Jackson said, “People didn't know about the sexual harassment that was going on: that's ridiculous. But what is utterly ridiculous is pretending that this isn’t happening in a private house up the road.”

The rumors were “constant” about offenders in her profession. “But the idea this only affects certain people in certain professions for certain reasons is crap. It’s been going on since they (Adam and Eve) walked out of the Garden of Eden, and it’s going on now.”

“Please don't mention their names to me”

When asked how it was living temporarily in Trump’s America, Jackson said New York was its own liberal cocoon, and that what Trump symbolized was “part and parcel of what’s going on around the world. It’s an insidious, pretty disturbing shift to the right. Look at what’s happening in the UK. Why are we leaving Europe, for God’s sake? Have we all gone crazy?”

The only benefit Jackson said she had taken from acting to politics was that she wasn’t afraid of public speaking, except when she stood up to make her maiden speech in Parliament: She found it very frightening, because she suddenly realized she was speaking for her constituents, “and a number of talented geniuses had lived in that constituency, like Keats."

Some of her MP colleagues had such colossal, puffed-up egos they would not have been “tolerated in professional theater for 30 seconds,” she said—although show business is hardly known for its fading flowers.

Jackson said she did not miss Parliament, though she missed her constituents, containing “every aspect of socioeconomic groupings. The image of Hampstead as exclusively occupied by millionaires who did nothing but chatter and sip champagne couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The political turmoil in the U.S. and U.K. had not disheartened her. Most members of political parties, she said, were motivated by a belief in public service, in doing something good and productive. There were "no silver bullets," she said, and while every step forward was incremental, “steps back can look like a ski slope.”

Immigration was the key issue of the Brexit vote, Jackson said, “and no political parties pulled that nettle out of the undergrowth and said, ‘OK, we’ve got to look at this.’”

If Brexit went ahead (as it would eventually do), “the big victory” would be to keep London in its primary position as Europe's leading financial capital, Jackson said, and the rights of workers and the maintenance of foreign treaties would also have to be maintained.

About then-Tory P.M. Theresa May, Jackson said, “I have a lot of admiration for her. It’s such a time to be as solitary as she is. You know she doesn't get support except from a small group of people. You look at her colleagues and think, ‘She’s the only bloody grown-up in the room.’”

As for May's colleagues and potential usurpers, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jackson adopted a pained expression. “Please don't mention their names to me. Oh come on, God almighty, talk about slipping backward down an icy slope. This is the 21st century.”

As for the anti-Semitism row then roiling Labour, Jackson said, “Jeremy Corbyn (then-leader) is not a racist, and I don’t believe he is anti-Semitic. What he is is pro-Palestinian. That presumably is where the conflict comes from, and whatever has been misread and misinterpreted.”

Jackson said she too had experienced “serious criticism” from Jewish organizations because of her own criticism of the Israeli government.

However, she recognized the present rise of anti-Semitism: she recalled Jewish constituents in 2015 saying they were thinking of leaving Britain. “I don't know where it’s come from, but no one seems able to handle it. Do we never learn? Dear God, it’s scandalous.”

Jackson said she had never met an anti-Semitic Labour Party member, but that the leadership should look into the issue and take appropriate action.

“Our electoral chances were pretty slim even without this. It certainly doesn't help.” When Jackson left Parliament, she sent Corbyn a letter saying that she regretted that she couldn’t nominate him for the leadership. “I would never have voted for him as a leader, but always thought there should be someone from the left on the ballot paper. I never thought in a million years he would win.”

“You’ve got it wrong. This is not a holiday”

In her later years, Jackson lived in the basement apartment of her son Dan Hodges—a newspaper columnist—and his wife’s home.

“He had an absolutely normal upbringing,” Jackson said of Dan. “He never went near a theater or film studio. He was never used for publicity photographs. He lived an absolutely normal childhood. He came home from school one day and said to me, ‘Are you famous?’ I said, ‘You could say that.’ He said, ‘What are you famous for?’”

Jackson shielded Dan from her fame, because she didn’t want it to be “destructive” for him. “If I worked in a factory, would I have taken him to it?” She laughed. “Well, I might have done actually.”

She and Dan’s family did not live in each other’s pockets, but she was close enough "for grandma duties" when required.

“I think I’m quite authoritarian and strict,” Jackson said of her relationship with her grandson, “but he ignores everything I say. It’s water off a duck’s back to him.” He had seen her in Lear and Three Tall Women, although she insisted he leave the theater for the part in Lear where Gloucester’s eye is gouged out.

“His heroes are the Marvel heroes,” said Jackson, then added with dry archness, “I’m not into superheroes. I have my doubts about them.”

Jackson only married once (to Dan's father, Roy Hodges; divorced in 1976), and said she was happy living independently. “It’s just the way life panned out. I think I am too set in my ways. My concern when that marriage broke up was Dan, but I was very fortunate his father shared the exact same point of view I did and shared raising him.”

Jackson said she would work as long as people approach her with projects she is interested in. She was raised, she said, “that if you didn’t work you didn’t eat. That’s a hard lesson to forget. I’ve been blessed with a strong work ethic.”

“My worse day is my day off. I feel so bloody tired,” Jackson told The Daily Beast. She said she left her character at work. “You shouldn’t have anything to take home after a performance. It should have all happened on stage. If you’re taking stuff home, you ain’t done your job. During rehearsals, you and your character are like Siamese twins, never apart from each other. That goes on for quite some time. But once you’re up and doing it there should be nothing to take home.”

Jackson’s reputation for fierceness, she thought, was because of the parts she has played and the way she has played them. She repeated to me what she had said before: two things bemuse her—that people found her frightening, and that they were surprised to find that she spoke in complete sentences.

“The second one I think is more amazing than the first because don't we all speak in complete sentences? I mean, what does that mean?”

Enjoy the rest of your run, this reporter said to Jackson, giving her a gentle hug as she prepared to leave.

“You’ve got it wrong. This is not a holiday,” Jackson said sharply.

This reporter looked at her expecting a fearsome scowl, but Glenda Jackson was smiling merrily.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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