JACKSON, Glenda

Nationality: British. Born: Hoylake, Merseyside, 9 May 1936. Education: Attended West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls; Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. Family: Married Roy Hodges (divorced), son: Daniel. Career: 1957—London debut in All Kinds of Men; 1963—film debut in This Sporting Life; 1964—critically acclaimed role in Marat/Sade for Royal Shakespeare Company, London; also made Broadway debut in this role, and played it in film; 1971—in TV mini-series Elizabeth R; 1974—on stage as Hedda Gabler; from 1970s—continues to work in films and on stage; 1983—joined United British Artists production group; 1985—on stage in Strange Interlude;1988—on stage in Macbeth as Lady Macbeth; 1990—selected as parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party, lost election; 1992—elected to House of Commons for the Labour Party, representing Hampstead and Highgate; 1997–1999—Transportation Minister in the British Government; announced her retirement from acting. Awards: Best Actress, Academy Award, National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress, Best Actress award, from the New York Film Critics, and D. W. Griffith Award from the National Board of Review, for Women in Love, 1970; two Emmy awards for performances in Elizabeth R, 1971; Etoile de Cristal, 1972; Best Actress, British Academy, and David Di Donatello award (Italy), for Sunday, Bloody Sunday, 1971; Best Actress, Academy Award, for A Touch of Class, 1973; Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1978; D. W. Griffith Award from National Board of Review for Best Actress, and Best Actress Award, New York Film Critics, for Stevie, 1981. Agent: Crouch Associates, 59 Frith Street, London W1, England.

Films as Actresses:

1963

This Sporting Life (Anderson) (bit role)

1965

Benefit of the Doubt (Whitehead) (documentary appearance in on-stage role)

1967

Marat/Sade (Brook) (as Charlotte Corday)

1968

Tell Me Lies (Brook); Negatives (Medak) (as Vivien)

1970

Women in Love (Russell) (as Gudrun Brangwen)

1971

The Music Lovers (Russell) (as Nina Milyukova); Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Schlesinger) (as Alex Greville); Mary, Queen of Scots (Jarrott) (as Elizabeth I); The Boy Friend (Russell) (as Rita)

1973

Triple Echo (Apted) (as Alice); A Bequest to the Nation (The Nelson Affair) (Jones) (as Emma Hamilton); A Touch of Class (Frank) (as Vicki Allessio); Il soriso del grande tentatore (The Tempter; The Devil Is a Woman) (Damiani) (as Sister Geraldine)

1974

The Maids (Miles) (as Solange)

1975

The Romantic Englishwoman (Losey) (as Elizabeth Fielding); Hedda (Nunn) (title role)

1976

The Incredible Sarah (Fleischer) (as Sarah Bernhardt); Nasty Habits (Lindsay-Hogg) (as Alexandra)

1978

House Calls (Zieff) (as Ann Atkinson); Stevie (Enders) (ti tle role)

1979

Lost and Found (Frank) (as Tricia); The Class of Miss MacMichael (Narizzano) (as Conor MacMichael); Build Me a World (Gane—doc) (as narrator)

1980

Hopscotch (Neame) (as Isobel von Schmidt); Health (Altman)

1981

Stop Polio (Keefe—doc) (as narrator); The Patricia Neal Story (Page and Harvey—for TV) (title role)

1982

The Return of the Soldier (Bridges) (as Margaret); Giro City (Karl Francis—for TV) (as Sophie)

1984

And Nothing but the Truth (Francis); Sakharov (Gold—for TV) (as Elena Bonner)

1985

Turtle Diary (Irvin) (as Nearer)

1986

Man-Made Famine (Sauvageot)

1987

Beyond Therapy (Altman) (as Charlotte); Business as Usual (Barrett) (as Babs Flynn)

1988

Salome's Last Dance (Russell) (as Herodias/Lady Alice); Strange Interlude (Wise)

1989

The Rainbow (Russell) (as Anna Brangwen); King of the Wind (Duffell) (as Queen Caroline)

1990

Doombeach (Finbow) (as Miss); Open Space: Death on Delivery (TV doc)

1991

The Castle (Foreman); A Murder of Quality (Millar); The House of Bernarda Alba (for TV)

1992

Secret Life of Sir Arnold Bax (Russell—for TV) (as Harriet Cohen)

1999

Jerry Springer on Sunday (as herself—for TV)

Publications

By JACKSON: articles—

"One-Take Jackson," interview with G. Gow, in Films and Filming (London), January 1977.

Interviews, in Photoplay (London), May 1981 and March 1983.

Interview, in Time Out (London), 29 October 1982.

Interview with Hal Rubenstein, in Interview, May 1988.

On JACKSON: books—

Nathan, David, Glenda Jackson, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1984.

Woodward, Ian, Glenda Jackson: A Study in Fire and Ice, London, 1985.

On JACKSON: articles—

Current Biography 1971, New York, 1971.

Spunner, S., and P. Longmore, "Glenda Jackson," in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), July-August 1975.

Ecran (Paris), March 1978.

Drew, Bernard, "Glenda Jackson," in The Movie Star, edited by Elisabeth Weis, New York, 1981.

Silvester, Christopher, "Labour Pains," in Connoisseur, July 1991.

Gam, Rita, "Enter Glenda, State Left," in World Monitor: The Christian Science Monitor Monthly, July 1992.

Radio Times (London), 18 July 1992.

A stage-trained British actress, Glenda Jackson worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company and for Peter Brook before entering films. Her first important film performance was the re-creation of her stage role in Brook's filming of his own stage production of the Peter Weiss play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade). Though not comprehensively distributed, the film excited critics in part because of Jackson's bold performance as the narcoleptic inmate. Critical acclaim and an Academy Award came to her in 1970 for her performance as Gudrun in Ken Russell's adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. In a cold and often repellent interpretation, Jackson created a Gudrun who is sexually driven, intelligent, lyrical, and aloof.

Jackson is noted for her full and expressive voice, her theatrical diction, and performances based less on naturalistic precepts than a declamatory theatrical tradition. Her face, though sometimes charged with eroticism, is by no means conventionally attractive, nor is her body, often bared in her films. Her dark, probing eyes are vaguely unsettling, and her mannerisms of touching her tongue to her teeth and curling her lips are both erotic and unpleasant. Her presence, which is considerable, demands attention and attracts the eye; her assured self-consciousness about her technique helps her to create a variety of characterizations. She followed her performance in Women in Love by starring in another Russell film, The Music Lovers, playing Tchaikovsky's nymphomaniac wife. It was a powerful, allout performance in a film of such visual and sexual excess that many critics recoiled. Jackson subsequently made a small industry of playing Queen Elizabeth, first in Elizabeth R, a series for British television which was more responsible than anything else for gaining Jackson her American stardom, and then in the film Mary, Queen of Scots, opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Mary. The two women gave extraordinary and completely different kinds of performances: Jackson's stylized and mannered, Redgrave's more naturalistic and lyrical—a contrast that perfectly expressed the differences between the characters.

The remainder of Jackson's film roles are noteworthy for their variety: as a woman who begins an affair with a married man in an American screwball comedy, A Touch of Class, in which Jackson proved surprisingly adept at repartee and slapstick, and for which she won her second Academy Award; as Hedda Gabler in the virtually undistributed Hedda, for which Jackson adapted her controversial stage performance and was given an Academy Award nomination; as poet Stevie Smith in Stevie, also based on a stage role, which presented a wry and much warmer Jackson than had heretofore been seen; as the contemporary heroine of John Schelsinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, an examination of a love triangle with a bisexual apex, for which Jackson received another Academy Award nomination; as a conniving and conspiratorial nun patterned after Richard Nixon in the Watergate-inspired comedy, Nasty Habits; as Sarah Bernhardt in the underrated The Incredible Sarah, in which Jackson was also given the opportunity to portray Bernhardt acting in her most famous roles, including Joan of Arc and Camille; as an Adlai-Stevenson-inspired, health faddist and possible transsexual, in Robert Altman's comedy Health; and as the repressed heroine in the odd, Harold Pinter-written love story, Turtle Diary.

Jackson's reputation as a film actress has declined somewhat in recent years, with the critical judgment that her screen persona remains unusually cold, whatever the role, and that her technique, from film to film, tends to be too unvarying. Unlike, say, Meryl Streep, who is the master of accents, Jackson has been unwilling, for example, to adjust her declamatory vocal technique—even in otherwise powerful, biographical performances in The Patricia Neal Story and Sakharov (both for television), playing well-known women (from Kentucky and Russia) who sound not even vaguely like Jackson. And yet it must be noted that Jackson has garnered extraordinary notice for her stage work in this period, including raves for the 1985 Strange Interlude (which has been preserved on video for television) and fascination for her controversial 1988 stage performance as Lady Macbeth. Perhaps the truth is that Jackson has a strong understanding of her own strengths and weaknesses and therefore sees no need to push beyond them; if she has lost some of her passion for acting, she has found her passion for politics and social commitment growing ever greater. Certainly, this political passion has been present as far back as her earliest, professional theatrical experiences (such as Peter Brook's anti-Vietnam play and film, Tell Me Lies). Clearly, Sakharov interested Jackson because playing Elena Bonner allowed her to make a statement about human rights; similarly, Business as Usual was a pro-labor, didactic drama that allowed Jackson to comment upon sexual harassment in Margaret Thatcher's England. Although Jackson made up with director Ken Russell, with whom she had had a falling out, to appear in Salome's Last Dance and, more notably, to appear in The Rainbow in the role of Anna Brangwen (the mother of Gudrun, the character she played in Women in Love), Jackson has virtually retired from acting, since her election to a seat in the British House of Commons, representing a working-class neighborhood for the Labour Party.

—Charles Derry

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.

Glenda Jackson 1936-, English actress and politician. Jackson's first starring role was as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade (1966) for the Royal Shakespeare Company . A strong personality, she has excelled in both comedies and dramas. She won Academy Awards for roles in Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973). Her other films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1972), The Maids (1974), House Calls (1978), Turtle Diary (1986), and The Rainbow (1990). In 1971 she played Elizabeth I in a critically acclaimed television series, and she has appeared on stage in such plays as Strange Interlude (1984). In 1992 she retired from acting and was elected as a Labour member of Parliament from Hampstead; she was reelected in 1997. In 1999 she mounted an abortive candidacy for mayor of London.

Jackson, Glenda (1936– ) British actress and politician. Jackson reprised her stage role in her film debut Marat/Sade (1967). Her performance in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) earned her an Academy Award for best actress. She won a second best actress Oscar for A Touch of Class (1973). Other films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Hedda (1975). She was elected to Parliament in 1992.