Jackson, Glenda

Jackson, Glenda (1936– ), English actress of strong personality and high intelligence, who made her first appearance in 1957 and was seen in London later the same year. In 1964 she joined the RSC, appearing in their Theatre of Cruelty season (see ARTAUD) in London, and first came into prominence as a strikingly erotic Charlotte Corday in the company's production of Weiss's Marat/Sade (NY, 1965), directed by Peter Brook, which sprang directly from that season. Her Masha in Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Royal Court Theatre in 1967 was remarkable for its tough, uninhibited passion. She was then only in films for some years, but returned to the stage as the waspish wife in John Mortimer's Collaborators (1973). In 1975 she toured Britain, the USA, and Australia for the RSC in the title-role of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and in 1976 was seen at the Old Vic in Webster's The White Devil, following it with the title-role in Hugh Whitemore's Stevie (1977), about the poet Stevie Smith. She was in Stratford in 1978 to play Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, and scored a big success as the discontented, married, middle-aged school-teacher in Andrew Davies's Rose (1980; NY, 1981). She used her high reputation to increase the audience for such commercially risky productions as Botho Strauss's Great and Small (1983), O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1984; NY, 1985), Racine's Phedra (1984), and García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba (1986). In New York in 1988 she was Lady Macbeth, and in 1990 she played Brecht's Mother Courage in Glasgow and London. Equally famous as a film star, she retired from acting on becoming a Labour MP in 1992.