GLENDA IS MISSING
Widely respected actress and politician Glenda Jackson has died aged 87. She made her first splash on the stage, with her breakout role as an insane asylum inmate emulating Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade. She continued to dazzle theatrically with a breadth of performances that included multiple Shakespeare roles and Eugene O’Neill play Strange Interlude.
She branched out to similar acclaim in film and TV, and it demonstrated her dexterity as an actress that she nailed roles from stern to silly. Her first Oscar was as Oliver Reed’s love interest in nudey romance drama Women in Love, while the second came opposite George Segal in romcom A Touch of Class. Her Elizabeth I in Elizabeth R, arguably the definitive portrayal of the Virgin Queen, won Emmys, while her Cleopatra alongside Morecambe and Wise won much laughter. Other noted dramatic roles included Sunday Bloody Sunday, Stevie, and Hedda, all the while staging a pirate takeover of The Muppet Show.
Her frustrations with Thatcher and Major spurred her to bring the same fire to politics that she had brought to the stage and screen. Halting her acting career to run for Parliament, she flipped Hampstead and Highgate in a rare bright light for Labour in the 1992 election. She served as Transport Under-Secretary in the early Blair years before resigning the cabinet post to unsuccessfully pursue the London mayorship. From the backbenches she was not shy in criticising Blair’s involvement in the Iraq War, and refused to whitewash Thatcher upon her death. After surviving the 2010 election by a mere 42 votes, Jackson retired from Parliament in 2015.
She returned to acting and did so with such aplomb you’d never thought she took a hiatus. Rather than ease into her stage return, she went straight for a mesmerising turn as King Lear himself. Her first TV role in 27 years as a grandmother with dementia in Elizabeth is Missing won a BAFTA, and she completed filming for her final film role opposite Michael Caine weeks before her death. All DDPers are fools (except for Dead And Dusted), and what makes them so is Glenda Jackson convincing them she had another year in her.
Glenda Jackson
9 May 1936 – 15 June 2023, aged 87
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