Glenda Jackson(1936–2023)

Glenda May Jackson was born at Birkenhead on the Wirral on 9 May 1936, eldest of four daughters of Harry Jackson, a bricklayer, and Joan Pearce, a shop assistant and later a cleaner at the local schools. The family moved to Hoylake when she was small. She left West Kirby County Grammar School at sixteen, worked behind the counter at Boots the chemist on Hoylake high street for two years, joined the local Townswomen's Guild amateur drama group, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1954 on the strength of a single audition. She arrived in London with one suitcase, a place in a Tufnell Park bedsit and the working-class Mersey accent she would never quite lose and never tried to.

Rep theatre on Hornchurch and Crewe through the late 1950s gave her the technique; the Royal Shakespeare Company gave her the headline. Peter Brook cast her in his 1964 *Theatre of Cruelty* season at LAMDA and then as Charlotte Corday in his production of Peter Weiss's *Marat/Sade* at the Aldwych in 1964; she played the part on Broadway in 1965 (Tony nomination) and in the 1967 film. The work made her, by the end of the 1960s, the most-discussed young British classical actress of the decade. The British New Wave directors found her at the same moment. Ken Russell cast her opposite Oliver Reed in *Women in Love* (1969), the explicit naked-wrestling-scene adaptation of D. H. Lawrence; she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971 for it. Melvin Frank cast her as the abrasive divorcée in *A Touch of Class* (1973) opposite George Segal; she won the Academy Award for Best Actress again. She was the third actor in the seventy-year history of the awards to that point to win Best Actress twice. She did the second Oscar acceptance speech entirely in absentia, sending a thank-you cable rather than fly out: she had a Royal Shakespeare Company rehearsal that day.

She did the 1970s on her own terms. The lead in Ken Russell's *The Music Lovers* (Tchaikovsky), Ibsen's *Hedda Gabler* on stage and screen with Trevor Nunn, the BBC's 1971 *Elizabeth R* (the BAFTA-winning six-part miniseries as Elizabeth I, the work most British viewers still picture her by), and the 1980 Robert Altman film *HealtH*. She also did *Stevie* (1978), *Hopscotch* (1980, with Walter Matthau), and the *Howards End* she did not quite get because Emma Thompson was the next generation. The single defining choice of her acting career was when she stopped, in 1990, at fifty-four, with the Oscars and the BAFTAs and an Olivier and a Tony nomination behind her, and stood for selection as the Labour candidate for the new Hampstead and Highgate constituency. She had been a Labour-Party activist since the early 1970s.

She won the seat from the Conservatives in the 1992 general election with a majority of 1,440 and held it through the Blair landslide, the second-term majority, the Iraq parliamentary vote (she voted against), the expenses scandal, and the 2010 hung parliament. She served as a junior transport minister under Blair, resigned after fourteen months over what she called the government's instrumentalist approach to public transport, and spent the next decade and a half on the backbenches as the most consistent critic of New Labour from her own side. She voted against the Iraq War, against tuition fees, against Trident renewal, against the welfare-reform legislation of the Cameron-Clegg coalition. Her most-quoted Commons speech was the obituary tribute to Margaret Thatcher in April 2013, the day after Thatcher's death, when she delivered ten minutes of unrelenting attack on the Thatcher record from the opposition front bench. The speech entered the Commons-oratory canon and was, in private, what most of her constituency expected of her.

She stepped down at the 2015 general election, sixty-eight years old, and announced she was going back to acting. She played Lear at the Old Vic in Deborah Warner's 2016 production at seventy-nine years old, in a male-coded reading of the part that was the central British classical performance of the decade, and won the Best Actress award at the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards in 2017. She played Lear again on Broadway in 2019 and won a Tony Award for it. She played the lead in Florian Zeller's *The Father* in the female-reworked version *The Mother* at Edinburgh and at the Tricycle in 2017, and in the BBC's *Elizabeth Is Missing* in 2019. She was given the BAFTA for the *Elizabeth Is Missing* lead at eighty-three. She died at her north London home on 15 June 2023, eighty-seven years old, after a short illness, three days after finishing post-production work on Christopher Munro's *The Great Escaper* opposite Michael Caine. The Jackson name in its dominant English form, the patronymic of Jack rooted in the industrial Yorkshire-Tyneside coal-and-shipyard belt, carries her on both Academy Awards and the Labour benches at once.