Glenda Jackson(1936–2023)

Glenda May Jackson was born at Birkenhead on the Wirral on 9 May 1936, eldest of four daughters of a bricklayer and a cleaner. She left grammar school at sixteen, worked behind the counter at Boots in Hoylake, joined a local amateur drama group, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1954 on a single audition, arriving in London with one suitcase and the Mersey accent she never tried to lose.

Repertory theatre gave her the technique and the Royal Shakespeare Company gave her the headline: Peter Brook cast her in his 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season and as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, which she took to Broadway and to film. Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971; A Touch of Class (1973) won her a second, making her one of very few actors to that point to win Best Actress twice. She sent a cable for the second rather than miss a rehearsal.

She worked the 1970s on her own terms, in The Music Lovers, Hedda Gabler, the comedies opposite Walter Matthau, and above all the BBC's Elizabeth R (1971), the six-part series many British viewers still picture her by, for which she won a BAFTA. Then, at the height of it, she stopped.

In 1992 she won Hampstead and Highgate for Labour and held the seat for twenty-three years, through four parliaments, serving briefly as a transport minister and then as one of the most independent voices on her own benches. Her ten-minute Commons address on the day after Margaret Thatcher's death in 2013 entered the canon of modern parliamentary oratory.

She stood down in 2015 and went straight back to acting. She played King Lear at the Old Vic in 2016 at seventy-nine, the central British classical performance of the decade, reprised it on Broadway and won a Tony Award for it in 2019, and won a BAFTA at eighty-three for Elizabeth Is Missing. She died at her north London home on 15 June 2023, eighty-seven years old, days after finishing her last film. The Jackson name, the patronymic of Jack rooted in the industrial Yorkshire and Tyneside belt, carries her on both Academy Awards and the Labour benches at once.