Facts
Glenda Jackson was shaped by her work
with the Royal Shakespeare Company
which she joined in 1964 and specifically
by director Peter Brook's
experimental Theatre of Cruelty
season that year and its Antoinin Artaud-influenced
improvisational games. She won acclaim for her chilling
performance as an asylum inmate portraying
Danton's murderer Charlotte Corday
in the 1965 London and New York productions of
Marat/Sade, staged by Brook. And although she made
a brief screen appearance as an extra
in This Sporting Life (1963), her first significant film
work was reprising the role of Corday
in Brook's 1967 screen version
of Marat/Sade, perhaps auguring
the many neurotics she has so brilliantly
portrayed on stage and film.
Plain-featured but striking looking,
with a gift for conveying blistering
disgust or contempt with her curled lip,
her clipped, almost spitting delivery
and her cold stare, Jackson
has nonetheless played a wide range of
roles from queens, romantics, seductresses
and sensualists to independent women
and intellectuals; she has excelled at
portraying high-strung, strong-willed
and sexually rapacious women in
notable films by such directors as
Ken Russell (The Music Lovers
1971), John Schlesinger (Sunday,
Bloody Sunday 1973) and Joseph
Losey (The Romantic Englishwoman 1975).
Jackson won two Best Actress Oscars,
for her roles in Russell's D.H. Lawrence
adaptation, Women in Love (1970) and for her change of pace performance in
Melvin Frank's light romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973). She also won two Emmys for her portrait of Queen Elizabeth I
from youth to old age on the series Elizabeth R
(shown in the USA on PBS in 1972).
Jackson made an assured switch to middle-aged roles in the mid-1970s, beginning with the Hepburn-Tracy style comedy, House Calls
(1978), opposite Walter Matthau. In 1992, Jackson
won a seat in the British Parliament
as a member of the Labour Party and retired from acting.
