Glenda Jackson obituary: An actress unafraid to speak her mind

Glenda Jackson, who has died aged 87, had scant patience for the usual foibles and pretensions of her profession.

"I regard acting," she once said, "as a serious job for serious-minded people."

Hollywood showered her with admiration and two best actress Oscars. But Jackson was not easily flattered.

Famously prickly, her view of Tinseltown often bordered on contempt. "If I'm too strong for some people," she said, "that's their problem".

And, at the height of her acting power, she gave it all up for a career in politics.

Better than working at Boots

Glenda May Jackson was born on 9 May 1936 in Birkenhead, in Wirral, the daughter of a bricklayer.

She attended the local grammar school, leaving at 16 to work at Boots.

Bored, she joined a YMCA drama group. "I had no real ambition about acting," she later recalled. "But I knew there had to be something better than the bloody chemist's shop."

Two years later, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

Glenda Jackson at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts in 1956

It was, according to one reviewer, her "intense, sexually-charged talent" that won her a place at the prestigious academy.

She made an impression while still at RADA, when she appeared in a production of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables.

She followed this up with the traditional actor's apprenticeship, doing six years in rep. She also had a small role in the 1963 film, This Sporting Life.

By this time she had married actor and art dealer Roy Hodges. The couple had a son, Dan, who is a noted political commentator.

Royal Shakespeare Company

She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1964. A year later, her big breakthrough came in Peter Brook's stage production of Marat/Sade.

Jackson played the lunatic asylum inmate who finds herself acting the role of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of the French revolutionary, Jean Marat.

Glenda Jackson in Marat/Sade.

David Edgar described her performance as that of a "waif-like narcoleptic unable to control her behaviour, but also - completely believably - the differently-mad person playing Corday".

Jackson transferred with the production to Broadway and, in 1967, appeared in a film version - also directed by Brook.

In 1969, she won her first Oscar, for best actress, in Ken Russell's adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, Women in Love.

The beautifully shot film became notorious for its nude scenes which, Jackson later recalled, she played with "a prevailing sense of coldness".

Her co-star Oliver Reed - hardly a shrinking violet himself - memorably described acting alongside her as like "being run over by a Bedford truck".

With Oliver Reed in Women in Love

The movie sparked Jackson's admiration for director Russell. Russell reciprocated, casting her in The Music Lovers, his biopic of Tchaikovsky.

The film, which revolved around the relationship between the homosexual composer and his nymphomaniac wife - played by Jackson - was not a commercial success.

But, according to one critic, the film was worth watching "thanks largely to a powerhouse performance by Glenda Jackson, one actress who can hold her own against Russell's excess".

Elizabeth R

In 1971, having appeared as Elizabeth I in the historically dubious film, Mary, Queen of Scots, she reprised the role in BBC TV's Elizabeth R.

The six-part series saw her play the Virgin Queen from princess to ailing old woman.

Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth

Jackson played the part with her customary intensity, even shaving her hair to accommodate the make-up required as her character aged.

She was now firmly established as one of the world's foremost dramatic actresses. She responded by sending herself up.

Morecambe and Wise

One interviewer described her as "so defiantly charmless that there is something oddly engaging about her, even vulnerable".

"As for her sense of humour," they went on, "it's by no means non-existent, but you often need long tweezers to find it." But that did not mean she lacked comic timing.

In 1971, she made her first appearance on the Morecambe and Wise Show - playing a comedy Cleopatra.

"All men are fools," she declared with a flourish, "and what makes them so is not having beauty like what I have got." The audience loved it, and Hollywood took note.

Glenda Jackson on the Morecambe and Wise show in 1971

Soon she found herself cast opposite George Segal in a romantic comedy, A Touch of Class.

Jackson plays a British divorcee who has an affair with a married American, and falls in love. Her classy, understated performance won her a second Oscar.

"Stick with us," cabled Morecambe, "and we will get you another one". But - as with her previous Academy Award - she refused to go to Hollywood to pick up the statuette.

"You don't do a play to compete for an award, "she explained. "I didn't win them. They were given to me."

George Segal and Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class

Hedda Gabler

Jackson's marriage ended in 1976, after Jackson's husband sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

She did not deny it, but later noted that she had never been involved in a non-violent relationship.

"When I have to cry," she later said, "I think about my love life. And when I have to laugh, I think about my love life."

She returned to the RSC in the title role of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directed by Trevor Nunn. She was Oscar-nominated for the subsequent film version, which Nunn also directed.

Glenda Jackson and Trevor Nunn in rehearsals for Hedda Gabbler.

She also received plaudits for her role in Howard Barker's play, Scenes from an Execution, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1984 - which subsequently transferred to the stage.

Jackson wowed the critics on Broadway when she appeared in Eugene O'Neill's melodrama, Strange Interlude. It required her to be on stage for four hours, as her character aged from a naive teenager to embittered mother.

The New York Times was ecstatic: "She's equally mesmerizing as a Zelda Fitzgerald-esque neurotic, a rotting and spiteful middle-aged matron and, finally, a spent, sphinx-like widow happily embracing extinction."

She joined forces with Russell again in 1989, with an appearance in The Rainbow.

Quitting the stage

At the age of 56, Jackson announced she was quitting acting - to stand as a Labour parliamentary candidate in the 1992 general election.

"The best theatre is trying to tell the truth," she said. "And the best politics is trying to tell the truth."

In an otherwise miserable election for her party, she won a notable victory in Hampstead and Highgate, which had been a Conservative seat for two decades.

Campaigning in the 1992 General Election

When Labour came to power in 1997, Jackson became a junior minister with responsibility for London Transport.

She resigned two years later, to make a bid to become Labour's candidate for the London mayor, but was defeated by Frank Dobson.

A left-winger by inclination, she became a fierce critic of Tony Blair's New Labour project and spoke out against the invasion of Iraq.

In 2005, she threatened to stand against Blair for the party leadership unless he announced his intention to stand down.

Attack on Thatcherism

With boundary changes, Jackson clung on to her seat in the 2010 general election with a wafer-thin majority of 42.

Campaigning with Gordon Brown in the 2010 general election.

But the most controversial moment in her political career came in April 2013, when Parliament was recalled to pay tribute to the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Lady Thatcher had just died. But Jackson saw no reason to rein in her criticism of a woman she believed "had inflicted heinous social, economic and spiritual damage upon the country".

Conservative MPs were furious when the Speaker refused to rule her remarks out of order. One political commentator accused the Labour left of being "petty", "childish" and "self-indulgent" with its ungracious attacks on the Iron Lady's memory. The writer was Jackson's son, Dan Hodges.

Jackson decided not to defend her seat at the 2015 general election. And - at the age of 79 - she returned to acting.

She played the 104-year-old Adelaide Fouque in a BBC Radio 4 production entitled Emile Zola: Blood Sex and Money.

And, in 2016 - a full quarter of a century after last treading the boards - took on the role of King Lear at the Old Vic.

Glenda Jackson as King Lear at the Old Vic in 2016

"My fear," she said, "was that I would not have the physical or vocal strength" to play one of Shakespeare's most challenging parts.

But the Daily Telegraph described her performance as "one of those 11th-hour feats of human endeavour that will surely be talked about for years to come".

Two years later, she won a Tony Award on Broadway in a revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women.

Chain-smoking and often barbed, she tolerated no fools. "No-one does scorn like Jackson," said one shell-shocked interviewer.

But the writer Marilyn Stasio best summed up the experience of watching her act: "It is like looking straight into the sun," she wrote in Variety magazine.

"Her expressive face registers her thoughts while guarding her feelings. But it's the voice that really thrills.

"Deeply pitched and clarion clear, it's the commanding voice of stern authority. Don't mess with this household god or she'll turn you to stone."

Jackson was winning accolades for her acting work as recently as 2020, when she won a Bafta TV Award for best leading actress for her performance in Elizabeth is Missing, about a woman suffering from dementia.

Shortly before her death, Jackson completed filming The Great Escaper, in which she co-starred with Michael Caine.