Appreciation: Glenda Jackson, formidable English talent who helped change contemporary acting’s tone
There was never anything shrinking about the confidence Glenda Jackson projected on stage and screen in her heyday. Afflicted with an uncommon common sense, her characters were defined by their sharp intelligence, independence and, yes, irritability. They were nobody’s fool, even when they wound up with the short end of the stick.
Jackson, who died Thursday at her home in London after a short illness at age 87, was one of the leading British actors of her generation. A two-time Academy Award winner (“Women in Love,” “A Touch of Class”), she rose to prominence as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, working with director Peter Brook on his path-breaking production of Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade,” an Artaud-inspired assault on the senses and a Brechtian call to revolution that became a cultural touchstone on Broadway and was later turned into a film.
Born to a working-class family in northwest England outside of Liverpool, Jackson became a symbol of a more liberated era, one in which actresses no longer had to be posh or properly submissive to be admired. She had toughness, smarts and political commitment, the last of which grew so strong that she took a leave from acting to become a full-time politician, representing her London district as a member of Parliament’s House of Commons for 23 years.
Above all, Jackson had a voice that was a precision-guided weapon. A raspy purr making bedroom promises one minute, it could turn fatally satiric the next. Once unleashed, the seething tone seemed to gather momentum. Jackson at her best was spurred on by grievance, the legitimate grievance of those who had been routinely underestimated because of gender or social class.
Glenda Jackson, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor who had a second career in politics as a member of the British Parliament, dies at 87.
A scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art transformed Jackson’s life. She denied, when we met for what turned into a disastrous tea when she was starring in the 2018 Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” that acting was her true calling. Rather, it was a way out of her constricted circumstances.
“I left school with no particular qualifications,” she said. “I was working at a local chemist shop, and a friend of mine was a member of a local amateur group and said, ‘Come along, it’s fun.’ And somebody said to me that I should do this professionally, so I wrote to the only drama school I had ever heard of and said I have to have a scholarship, because we have no money. But I think the motive, which I came to later, was that I felt that there had to be more to life than I was experiencing, and that I possibly had more to offer than was being asked of me.”
That sense that something as capricious as luck or timing could determine an entire existence never left her. The unfairness of an economic system that could just as easily have relegated her to a lifetime of unchallenging work and undiscovered abilities sharpened her moral mission.
She was temperamentally suited to command. (Not for nothing did she win two Emmy Awards for playing Elizabeth I.) When Margaret Thatcher was being eulogized in 2013, Jackson gave the other side of the prime minister’s legacy in a blistering critique of Thatcherism that resounded in Parliament and across the internet with Shakespearean thunder.
Jackson naturally gravitated toward difficult women — Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, making mischief in her bourgeois prison; Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, determined to grab the regicidal opportunity she fears her husband is too lily-livered to snatch; O’Neill’s Nina in “Strange Interlude,” unable to emotionally submit to the dictates of men.
When she returned to the stage in London 2016, she didn’t test the waters, as some more cautious performers might after more than two decades away. Instead, she took on the most challenging role in the dramatic canon: King Lear.
Deborah Warner’s modern-dress production at the Old Vic presented Shakespeare’s tragedy in flashes of contemporary lightning. Not all of it worked, but Jackson was every inch the furious monarch.
Seizing hold of the character’s emotional savagery, Jackson let us see that it was born not just from royal entitlement but also from filial selfishness and ingratitude. The transformation was subtle. Lear’s personality never loses its angry cast, but the shift in consciousness was meticulously illuminated. When Lear looks on at shivering, unsheltered Poor Tom and says with anguished regret, “Oh I have taken too little care of this,” Jackson delivered the line as a turning point, a moment when empathy provokes both a personal and political reckoning.
Jackson was an important figure in my childhood. My mother, whose father’s family was from the north of England, felt a connection to her. I remember watching “A Touch of Class” with my mother as a child in the 1970s. I shared this memory with Jackson when I interviewed her at a tea place on Manhattan’s East Side in 2018, but she wasn’t filled with cozy feelings for members of the media.
As a former left-wing politician, she had reason to see the press as adversarial. But I wasn’t intending to grill her on her past policy positions. I wanted to discuss her acting career, her collaborations with Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company, her two screen performances that meant the most to me (“Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Stevie”), her long swerve into politics, her experience of “King Lear” in London and her decision to do Albee’s “Three Tall Women” on Broadway.
Snappish, at times sneeringly so, she answered my questions with a brusque dismissiveness that made me think that she was doing this interview under duress. I returned to my hotel in a state of shock, not sure how I would be able to turn this terse confrontation into a profile of this renowned English actress venturing back to Broadway after 30 years.
Jackson was the opposite of a Method actor, but after I saw her majestically cantankerous performance in “Three Tall Women,” I realized that I was meeting someone who seemed to have taken Albee’s scathingly acerbic character to heart. She won a Tony for her portrayal and my undying professional admiration, but I hoped never to cross paths with her again.
But Jackson returned to New York the following year in a different production of “King Lear,” this one unsteadily directed by auteur Sam Gold. I plucked up the courage to go another round, hoping at this point we could at least deeply engage on the subject of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Be careful what you wish for.
Two things stand out from that far more harmonious encounter. I asked her about the great Lears that she had experienced in her lifetime. She didn’t appreciate the question, but then she remembered watching Paul Scofield in Brook’s landmark 1962 production at Stratford-upon-Avon. She told me that she would stand in the wings at the RSC agog at Scofield’s brilliance. As she spoke, her demeanor softened and the years seemed to fall away.
Jackson told me that her grandson had caught the acting bug but that she was doing everything in her power to dissuade him. The reason? “Overcrowded, under-served, terrible life.” But recalling the greatness of Scofield, she revealed the depth of her passion for the art form.
The other memory that stands out is how we parted. Instead of rushing away, there was a moment of connection. She asked where I was going next, and I told her to visit my father, who was celebrating his 80th birthday that day. She seemed genuinely touched and wished us both well.
I would later see Jackson perform in that misguided production of “King Lear.” The reviews were atrocious, but with the prevailing sentiment that Jackson deserved better. But I would never speak to her or see her again on stage.
She had complained that there were few roles of interest being written for women of her age. But her eyes lit up when I suggested that she try something by Samuel Beckett. She was daring to the end, willing to undergo the severest of tests and submerge herself in the starkest truths. Agreeable she wasn’t, but at the bottom of all her work was something more meaningful: a fiery solidarity.
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