RADA-trained 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 Antoine 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.
- Also Credited As:
Glenda May Jackson
- Born:
May 9, 1936 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom
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Job Titles:
Actor, Pharmacy assistant, Politician, Receptionist, Switchboard operator, Waitress
Family
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Father: Harry Jackson.
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Mother: Joan Jackson.
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Son: Daniel Hodges. born in 1969; father, Roy Hodges; on February 21, 1992 lost his left eye when a broken beer glass was shoved in his face after he stood up for two black men who were being taunted by whites in a south London pub
Significant Others
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Companion: Andy Phillips. together from 1975 until c. 1991
Education
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Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, England
Milestones
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1957 London stage debut in All Kinds of Men
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1957 Stage debut in Separate Tables at Worthing, England
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1963 Film debut as an extra in a party scene (as one of a group singing For he s a jolly good fellow ) in This Sporting Life
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1963 Joined Royal Shakespeare Company
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1964 Appeared in Peter Brook s and Charles Marowitz s experimental Theatre of Cruelty season, sponsored by the RSC at LAMDA
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1964 Played one of title character s girlfriends in London stage production of Alfie
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1965 Broadway debut, Marat/Sade
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1965 Film acting debut in Benefit of the Doubt , film about the staging of the RSC production of the play US (directed by Peter Whitehead)
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1965 Starred as Charlotte Corday in London premiere of Marat/Sade
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1967 Reprised role of Charlotte Corday in the Peter Brook film of Marat/Sade
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1974 Formed Bowden Productions with American producer Robert Enders after they made The Maids (1974); subsequently made Hedda (1975), Nasty Habits (1976) and Stevie (1978) together
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1983 The Glenda Jackson Theatre was opened in Hoylake
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1992 Ran against Tory Conservative Oliver Letwin for a seat in the House of Commons as the Labour Candidate from the Hampstead and Highgate sections of London; won election
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1997 Named minister of rail transport by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair
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1999 Resigned from her junior minister position and announced candidacy for the post of mayor of London; lost Labor primary to Frank Dobson
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2000 Appointed as advisor on homelessness by London mayor Ken Livingstone
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Family moved to her father s birthplace, Hoylake, England when Jackson was a year old
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Went two years with almost no acting work at all; worked as shop assistant, waitress, switchboard operator and as saleswoman at Woolworths
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Worked as a saleswoman at Boots pharmacy in Nottingham before entering RADA