Glenda Jackson

At 88 years old, Glenda Jackson has this physical status:

Glenda May Jackson (born 9 May 1936) is an English actress and politician.

Jackson spent four years as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1964 to 1971, and was particularly associated with director Peter Brook's career.

She has received two Academy Awards for Best Actress: Women in Love (1970) and A Touch of Class (1973).

She has also received awards for her work as Alex in the film Sunday Bloody Sunday and Elizabeth R's BBC television serial (both 1971): she has two Primetime Emmy Awards for the latter.

Jackson received a Tony Award in a Play for her role in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women revival, making her one of the few actors to have a "triple crown of acting" in 2018. Jackson also worked in politics, beginning in 1992 when she was elected as the Labour Party MP for Hampstead and Highgate.

She served as a Junior Transport minister from 1997 to 1999, later becoming critical of Blair.

She appeared in parliament from 2010 to Kilburn, representing Hampstead and Kilburn.

Her majority of 42 votes in the general election this year was one of the closest results of the entire election.

In 2011, she declared that she would vote against in the 2015 general election.

Early life

Glenda Jackson was born on Saturday, May 9, 1936, at 151 Market Street in Birkenhead, Cheshire. Her mother named her after Glenda Farrell, a Hollywood film actress. The family lived in Hoylake, Wirral, a little after her birth. Glenda's family was extremely poor and lived in a two-up, two-down home at 21 Lake Place with an outside toilet. Her father Harry was a builder, while her mother Joan (née Pearce) worked at the local supermarket checkout, pulled pints in a pub, and was a domestic cleaner.

Glenda, the oldest of four daughters, was educated at Holy Trinity Church of England and Cathcart Street primary schools, followed by West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls in nearby West Kirby, and she competed in the Townswomen's Guild drama group in her teens. Jackson made her first acting appearance in J. The mystery of Greenfingers appeared in 1952 for the YMCA Players in Hoylake. She spent two years in Boots the Chemists before receiving a scholarship in 1954 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. (RADA) In early 1955, Jackson returned to the capital to begin the process.

Personal life

Jackson met Roy Hodges, a stage manager and fellow actor in their repertory theater company in 1957. The pair began a new life together. On August 2, 1958, Jackson and Hodges were married at the St Marylebone Register Office in London. Daniel Jackson, their son, was born in 1969; Jackson was six months pregnant when filming on Women in Love was completed. Dan Hodges, a former Labour Party strategist and commentator who works as a newspaper columnist for The Mail on Sunday, is a former Labour Party strategist and commentator. "Well, I'll have to emigrate!'" Jackson replied after her son announced that he would write for the conservative magazine.

By the 1970s, Jackson's marriage was in danger, and in 1975, she began an affair with Andy Phillips, the lighting director for a Hedda Gabler film, where she was also starring. Roy Hodges divorced Jackson on the grounds of her adultery with Phillips in November of this year, and the couple was divorced in 1976. Before 1981, Jackson and Phillips were in an on-off relationship. In 2016, it was revealed that she had been "happily single for decades."

Jackson and her husband lived in Swiss Cottage, north west London, where she would later represent as an MP. The couple immigrated to Blackheath, south east London, in the late 1960s. She lives in a basement granny flat in downtown Toronto, with her son, wife, and their son, her first grandchild, as of 2020. In Who's Who's Who? as cooking, gardening, and reading Jane Austen, Jackson outlined her involvement in Who's Who as cooking, gardening, and reading Jane Austen.

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Acting Career

In January 1957, Jackson made her professional debut in Ted Willis' Doctor in the House at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing. While Jackson was still in RADA and appeared in repertory theatre, she was followed by Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables. She served as a stage manager in Crewe's repertory theatre.

Jackson spent two and a half years as a performer in 1958 to 1961, but she was unable to find acting jobs. She unsuccessfully auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and undertook what she later described as "a series of soul-destroying jobs." This included waitressing at The 2i's Coffee Bar, clerical service for a major City of London company, answering phones for a theatrical agent, and a role at British Home Stores. She appeared as a Bluecoat at Butlin's Pwllheli holiday resort in North West Wales, where her new husband and fellow actor Roy Hodges was a Redcoat. Jackson later returned to Dundee's repertory theatre, but he spent time in jail in between acting roles.

Jackson made her film debut in a small part of the kitchen sink tragedy This Sporting Life (1963). Charlotte Corday, the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, was a member of the Royal Society of Cruelty from 1963. She appeared in Peter Weiss' Theatre of Cruelty (1965), where she appeared in an insane asylum portraying Charlotte Corday, the RSC's assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. In 1965 and Paris, the performance appeared on Broadway and in Paris (Jackson also appeared in the 1967 film version). In Peter Hall's production of Hamlet the same year, she appeared as Ophelia. Penelope Gilliatt, a critic, said Jackson was the only Ophelia she had seen before being able to play the Prince himself.

The RSC's staging at the Aldwych Theatre of America (1966), a resistance play against the Vietnam War, also included Jackson, and Tell Me Lies appeared in its film version. She appeared in Negatives (1968), which was not a huge financial success, but she received further accolades for her work later this year.

Jackson's role in Ken Russell's film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1969) earned her her first Academy Award for Best Actress. "Her blazing intelligence, sexual growth, and abrasiveness were at the service of a superbly written role in a film with a passion that was otherwise unhearded in British cinema," Brian McFarlane, the main author of The Encyclopedia of British Cinema.

Russell described it as "the tale of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac" in the process of gaining support for The Music Lovers (1970) from United Artists, the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and Antonina Miliukova, played by Jackson. In the United States, the film received mixed feedback; the anonymous reviewer in Variety wrote of the two principals, "Their performances are more explosive than sympathetic, or even plausible." The Music Lovers were a hit in Europe, with one of them at No. 1 in the world. In March 1971, the UK's top 10 in the weekly polls reached number one. It was the first of four films starring Jackson that would reach the top of the box-office charts in her native country. Jackson was initially keen on Sister Jeanne's role in Russell's next film, but she decided not to pursue a third neurotic character in a row.

In the BBC's serial Elizabeth R (1971), Jackson had her head shaved to play Queen Elizabeth I. She received two Primetime Emmy Awards for her role as the series premiered on PBS in the United States. She appeared in Queen Elizabeth in the film Mary, Queen of Scots, and she received an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA Award for her part in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (both 1971). Bloody Sunday topped the UK box office charts for two weeks in July. Exhibitors in the United Kingdom voted her as the 6th most influential celebrity at the British box office last year. Jackson's fame in 1971 was such that she was given Best Film Actress awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain (who also received her commendations in 1975 and 1978). The New York Film Critics and the US National Society of Film Critics were among her recipients.

Queen of Scots was premiered in Los Angeles in December 1971, and she was the 1972 Royal Film Performance in Britain attended by Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Lord Snowdon. The film reached No. 69. In April that year, the UK box office ranked No. 1 in the UK box-office charts, the first position to hold for five weeks in a row. In their 1971 Christmas special, Jackson appeared with Morecambe and Wise for the first time. "All men are fools, and what makes them so is beauty like what I have." She appeared in a comedy sketch for the BBC Morecambe and Wise Show. She also performed a song-and-dance routine (where she was kicked offstage by Eric), a period drama about Queen Victoria, and another musical routine (in their Thames Television series) in which she was raised ten feet in the air by a misbehaving swivel chair. Jackson and Wise appeared in a 1981 information film for the Blood Transfusion Service.

Melvin Frank, a film actress, liked Jackson's comedic abilities on the Morecambe and Wise Show and gave her the lead female role in his romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973), co-starring George Segal, which was a UK box-office No. 1. In June 1973, the first one was born. Jackson's role in the film earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in February 1974. She continued to work in theatre, returning to the RSC for the lead in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Hedda (1975), a later film version directed by Trevor Nunn, was released as Hedda (1975), for which Jackson was nominated for an Academy Award. Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: "This version of Hedda Gabler is all Miss Jackson's Hedda, and it's also amusing to see... Miss Jackson's technical virtuosity is especially appropriate to a character like Hedda." Her command of her voice and body, as well as Jackson's demeanor, have the ability to distinguish the actress from the role in a strange way."

In 1978, she had hit box office success in the United States in the romantic comedy House Calls, co-starring Walter Matthau, with the film's stay at No. 148. In the US box-office rankings, the top 1 position. House Calls was the highest box-office hit of her career in the United States. She was given a CBE this year. In 1979, she and her A Touch of Class colleagues Segal and Frank reunited for the romantic comedy Lost and Found. In the comedy Hopscotch (1980), Jackson and Matthau teamed up again, with the debut of No. 1 in the comedy Hopscotch (1980). In its first weekend at the US box office, the 1 is in its second week in its second week in the top spot.

Jackson told the designers that she would do whatever material they liked during her 1980 appearance on The Muppet Show. She has a delusion that she is a pirate captain who rules the Muppet Theatre as her ship in her appearance.

In Andrew Davies' Rose (1981), the actresses appeared on Broadway for the first time in fifteen years; they were both nominated for their roles.

The Glenda Jackson Theatre in Birkenhead was named in her honour in September 1983. The theatre had been attached to Wirral Metropolitan College but it was demolished in 2005 following the construction of a purpose-built student center.

She appeared in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude at the Nederlander Theatre in 1985, a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude at the Nederlander Theatre, which had originated in London and lasted for eight weeks. "Bravura is the inevitable word for Miss Jackson's display of feminine wiles and innovative technique," John Beaufort of The Christian Science Monitor wrote. When Leeds is a young woman, "looks like a cubist portrait of Louise Brooks," and later, a deteriorating and dissatisfie middle-aged matron, a child, and finally, a rich, sphinx-like widow embracing extinction," according to Frank Rich in The New York Times. Herbert Wise produced a British television version of O'Neill's drama, which first appeared in the United States as part of PBS' American Playhouse in January 1988.

Jackson appeared in Robert David MacDonald's English translation of Racine's Phèdre, Phedra, at The Old Vic in November 1984. Philip Prowse conceived and directed the play, Robert Eddison performed Theramenes. "Wonderfully impressive," John Barber of The Daily Telegraph wrote about her appearance, "Wonderfully impressive." The actress develops a voice that is both jagged and hoarse as her torment. Benedict Nightingale in the United States was curious that Jackson didn't apply for nobility, but Racine's zealous queen played Racine's sarcastic, humiliating profession. The costume for Jackson's appearance in the Victoria and Albert Museum is on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and classic photographs of Jackson in the role can be found online.

Jackson appeared in Ken Russell's The Rainbow in 1989, playing Anna Brangwen, mother of Gudrun, the role for which she had been crowned with her first Academy Award twenty years ago. Martha In an Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf production in Los Angeles, she appeared as Martha. At the Doolittle Theatre (now the Rialbán Theatre). This production was directed by the playwright himself. John Lithgow played George in this performance. Jackson and Lithgow appeared "with the promise of dedicated character assassination, not like recruit-and-salary employees," according to Los Angeles Times author Dan Sullivan, with the actors being able to demonstrate their antipathy ability. Albee was dissatisfied with this result, referring to Jackson, who said she had "retreated to the thing she does best, namely ice cold results." I don't know if she was afraid, but Martha was being Martha in rehearsal, and the closer we got to opening, the less Martha was!"

Galactia, a nineteenth-century female Venetian artist, appeared in Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution as Galactia, a lead role in the Almeida Theatre in 1990. It was an adaptation of Barker's 1984 radio play in which Jackson had appeared in the same role.

Following a 23-year absence, Jackson returned to acting in 2015 after being barred from politics for 23 years. In a series of Radio 4 plays, Blood, Sex, and Money based on a series of novels by Émile Zola, she played Dide, the ancient matriarch. In a performance that ran from 25 October to 32 December, she returned to the stage at the end of 2016, playing the title role in William Shakespeare's King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre in London. Jackson was nominated for Best Actress at the Olivier Awards for her role, but Billie Piper was eventually disqualified. She did, however, win the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress at the 2017 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performance. "Glenda Jackson is a natural performer as King Lear," Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph wrote. No ifs, no buts. She has pulled off one of those 11th-hour human endeavors that will surely be talked about for years to come by those who witness it. She appeared in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra of the Glasgow Citizens, aged 80, 25 years since her last appearance (as the Clytemnestra-like Christine in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra).

In 2018, Jackson performed in a revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, winning the 2018 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. "Watching Glenda Jackson in a dramatic flight is like looking straight into the sun," Marilyn Stasio of Variety said. Even though shielding her emotions, her expressive face suggests her thoughts. But it's the voice that draws the most attention. It's the commanding voice of stern authority, as it's increasingly pitched and clarified. If you're looking for a unique gift, don't mess with this household god or she'll bring you to stone.

In a play that opened in April 2019, Jackson returned to the role of King Lear on Broadway. In The New York Times Magazine, director Sam Gold describes Lear's portrayal: "She's going to go through something that most people don't go through." You're all invited. You're going to see it at Glenda Jackson, and she's going to be the subject.

In 2019, after a 27-year absence, Jackson returned to television drama, portraying an elderly grandmother struggling with dementia in Elizabeth Is Missing, based on Emma Healey's book, for which she received the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress and International Emmy Award for Best Actress.

In February 2021, it was announced that Jackson would co-star Michael Caine in The Great Escaper, a film based on Bernard Jordan's escape from his care home to commemorate the D-Day landings in France's 70th anniversary. Caine will play Jordan, with Jackson as his wife Irene. Caine and Jackson appeared in The Romantic Englishwoman (1976).

With a month-long retrospective season at BFI Southbank in London in July 2022, the British Film Institute commemorated her film and television careers. Glenda Jackson in Conversation, as well as film screenings of her work, was on display in the program, where she was interviewed by broadcaster John Wilson about her career live on stage.

Political career

Jackson joined the Labour Party in the early 1950s, at the age of 16. However, her earlier campaigns were not politically oriented. In 1978, she was one of the few public figures to lend their name as a sponsor of the Anti-Nazi League. She appeared in a print advertisement for Oxfam in the same year. Jackson served as the executive of the National Association of Voluntary Hostels and appeared at rallies for the housing charity Shelter. Human rights were also a point of concern, and she led a march outside the Indonesian Embassy to protest political prisoners detention. She was active in children's charities, as president of the Toy Libraries Association and narrating UNICEF programmes. Former actress Coral Atkins donated her time and resources to a home for emotionally troubled children in Berkshire.

Jackson, a promoter of the National Abortion Campaign, arranged a benefit evening for them at the Cambridge Theatre, which raised over £3,000. She also supported Dr. Una Kroll's Women's Rights nomination for Sutton and Cheam at the general election in October 1974. In addition, Jackson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions? During this period of her career, she participated in a debate program. She had intended to become a social worker and started a social science degree at the Open University in 1979, but she died a few months later after falling behind with her essays. Jackson appeared in a number of charity films, including on behalf of the International Year of the Child, Voluntary Service Overseas, and Oxfam. Her campaigns against polio and the arms trade were included in other such films.

Over the years, Jackson's name had been linked to several political positions; she was invited by a Constituency Labour Party in Bristol to vote in 1979; but, no such thing came to fruition. An approach was also offered to her about the possibility of running for the marginal Welsh seat of Bridgend in 1983, which she turned down in order to pursue a humanities degree at Thames Polytechnic. However, she was forced to leave before starting the program. She favored Paul Boateng and Ian Wilson, Labour's representatives for Hertford West and Watford, respectively, at the 1999 general election. She was also a member of the Arts for Labour party.

Jackson went to Ethiopia in 1986 as part of Oxfam's attempts to help with the famine, and she told VSO in 1989 that she might work in Africa for a few years. She was instrumental in the 1980 African National Congress' fight against apartheid in South Africa and chaired a United Nations committee on the cultural boycott in September 1988. In February 1987, Jackson appeared in a Labour party political broadcast for Labour. She appeared at a campaign rally with Labour leader Neil Kinnock for the general election in June.

Denis Healey, a Labour MP, was reported in December 1989 that two Leeds East CLP branches had approached Jackson to replace him. However, Chris Bryant, her biographer, regretted this opportunity. Hampstead and Highgate CLP's two members in late 1989 became in touch with Jackson about the possibility of being there. Despite never having been to a Labour Ward Meeting, she won over the local party and won the election, which took place on March 28, 1990. On a new Camden mayor, Kate Allen (Ken Livingstone's partner and a Camden councillor), economic historian Sarah Palmer (daughter of former Labour MP Arthur Palmer) and Mauden Robinson, a former Mayor of Camden, were among those who were all politically conservative.

Jackson has since said that the Conservative government's policies had "ruined" Britain, meaning she would do "anything that was legal" to oppose her. Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister and Party leader in November 1990. She was recalled by John Major, who will lead the party in the upcoming general election. Hampstead and Highgate were held by Conservative Geoffrey Finsberg, who had announced his resignation as an MP at the time. Finsberg had been representing the constituency and its predecessor, Hampstead, since 1970, when he took the seat from the previous Labour MP.

Jackson resigned from serving in 1991 in order to devote herself entirely to politics as the potential parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Highgate. Although her party did not win the 1992 general election, as had been predicted, there was an above-average vote in her constituency, and she kept her position, barely beating Conservative candidate Oliver Letwin, a former advisor to prime minister Thatcher. Jackson, who had been financed by the train drivers' union, ASLEF, was the first of Labour's 1992 intake to join the front bench after being elected shadow transport minister in July 1996.

Following Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 general election, which saw her comfortably re-elected, she was named as a junior minister in Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, with responsibility for transport in London. She resigned from the job in 1999 after an unsuccessful attempt to run as the Labour candidate for the first Mayor of London in 2000. She came in a distant third behind Frank Dobson and Ken Livingstone in Labour's selection process, losing by 4.4 percent of the vote in the first round. At the 2001 general election, Jackson was re-elected to represent her constituentry.

Jackson, a well-known backbencher, became a vocal critic of Blair's proposal to raise education tuition fees in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Following Lord Hutton's Judicial Enquiry in 2003 regarding the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the death of government advisor Dr. David Kelly, she has also called on him to resign. She retained her position in the upcoming 2005 general election, despite a diminished majority and a swing to the Conservatives, who had chosen local councillor Piers Wauchope.

Her dissatisfaction with Blair's leadership had risen to a point where she threatened to sue the prime minister as a stalking horse in a leadership election if he does not stand down within a reasonable period of time. On October 31, 2006, Jackson was one of 12 Labour MPs to endorse Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party's call for an inquiry into the Iraq War.

For the 2010 general election, her constituency boundaries were rewritten. The Gospel Oak and Highgate wards became part of Holborn and St Pancras, and the new Hampstead and Kilburn constituency expanded into Brent's territory, including Brondesbury, Kilburn, and Queens Park wards (from the old Brent East and Brent South seats). Jackson was elected as the MP for the new Hampstead and Kilburn constituency by a margin of 42 votes over Conservative Chris Philp, with Liberal Democrat candidate Edward Fordham less than a thousand votes behind them on May 6, 2010. At the 2010 election, she obtained the closest result in England and the second largest majority of any MP. For the majority of her time in politics, Jackson's tenure in office was marginal, with the 1997 election being the only occasion on which she received a majority of votes cast in the constituency.

Jackson said in June 2011 that she did not seek re-election because the Parliament of 2010 didn't exist until 2015. "I will be almost 80 years old, and by then, it will be time for someone else to take the floor," she said. The general election was held two days before her 79th birthday, 23 years since she had first stepped into the House of Commons.

Following Margaret Thatcher's death in April 2013, Jackson delivered a speech in parliament. She accused Thatcher of treating "vices as virtues" and claimed that, because of Thatcherism, the UK was vulnerable to unprecedented unemployment risks and homelessness. Jackson's tenure as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions went viral in June 2014, a brief statement by the former governor of Iain Duncan Smith's tenure as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, advising him that he was partly responsible for the "destruction of the welfare state and complete incompetence of his department."

Jackson, a socialist, was generally regarded as a traditional left-winger during her political career, often dissatisfied with the more centrist-governing Third Way faction in the Labour Party's governing Third Way party; she protested against her party in parliamentary elections on several occasions. However, she was also opposed to Arthur Scargill and Militant's left-wing politics, which dominated the party's opposition in the 1980s. During his high-profile 1985 Labour Party conference address in which he attacked Militant et al's politics, Jackson referred to Militant and Derek Hatton's policies as "self-indulgent crap," and she sent leader Neil Kinnock a congratulatory telegram. She voted for John Smith in the 1992 Labour leadership race, and two years later, she backed Tony Blair, who later became Prime Minister Tony Blair.

She condemns the British monarchy and is a republican. "traditional Labour, nationalism, feminism," Jackson's feminism was summed up by Guardian columnist Simon Hattenstone. Jackson has criticized the lack of gender equality for women.

In 2008, she expressed her support for Blair's replacement as Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown was with Jackson on a campaign visit to the 2010 general election, with him referring to her as "a very close friend." Jackson voted for David Miliband, who was deemed more of a political moderate than his older brother Ed (a figure on the party's soft left), who was eventually elected as the party leader in the 2010 Labour leadership race, despite Brown's resignation.

Following her resignation from parliament, the Labour Party named Jeremy Corbyn as the party's leader. Jackson has said that she supports him "as a person" and that she would have nominated him in the 2015 leadership race. However, she defended her position by saying, "I never in a million years have I voted for him."

Jackson voted against Britain's membership in the European Economic Community in 1975. She later changed her mind on the issue, but she favoured Britain's stay in the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Despite this, she refused to allow a second vote. To this end, she expressed her admiration for then Prime Minister Theresa May; when she was asked by the interviewer, Emma Brockes, Jackson responded, "I've certainly admired her for the way she has handled herself in the way she has treated herself against Brexit." Even though I opposed it, I do respect her for her tenacity in attempting to get the referendum vote to the people of our country.

In July 2020, Jackson said she was content with him as the party's leader from Corbyn. "I just wish Keir would have someone to help him develop his voice," she wrote about Starmer in 2022, "I just wish Keir will have someone to help him develop his voice," she said about it as "one of his big drawbacks."

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