The Return of the Classic Films Obituary Thread

[CBHagman]

40. Actress and politician Glenda Jackson, 87

A tribute from Michael Billington in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/jun/15/glenda-jackson-died-aged-87

Born in Birkenhead, Jackson first came to prominence in 1964, in an experimental Peter Brook Theatre of Cruelty season at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda), during which she was stripped naked, bathed and dressed in a prison uniform to the words of a report on the Christine Keeler case. Jackson went on to join the RSC, playing Charlotte Corday in Brook’s production of Marat/Sade and Ophelia to David Warner’s Hamlet at Stratford. Prophetically, Penelope Gilliatt began her review in the Observer by saying that Jackson was the first Ophelia who should have played Hamlet. “She makes Ophelia,” wrote Gilliatt, “exceptional and electric, with an intelligence that harasses the court and a scornful authority full of Hamlet’s own self-distaste.”

Those qualities were evident in much of Jackson’s later work: a sharp, probing mind and a built-in bullshit detector that allowed her to see through all forms of pretence. I always remember how as Elizabeth I in the 1971 movie, Mary, Queen of Scots, she delivered a blow to the First Earl of Leicester’s solar plexus that would have felled Muhammad Ali. But Jackson could be tender as well as tough: in the same year she did a Fred and Ginger routine on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show, and in 1974 she won a second Oscar (her first was for Women in Love) playing a dress designer who has a hectic affair with George Segal’s American businessman in A Touch of Class.

If there was one quality that defined Jackson’s career, it was a willingness to take risks. You saw that in two of her finest stage performances. In 1983, she played a woman cut off from her roots in Botho Strauss’s Big and Small and displayed what I called “the frightening ability of a Beckett heroine to stare into the abyss”. A year later she was the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s four-hour-plus Strange Interlude capturing all the inner turbulence of a woman who shows both delight and disgust with the men she variously possesses.

Her IMDB credits:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0413559/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1