Glenda Jackson

Glenda May Jackson, CBE (born 9 May 1936) is a British Labour Party politician and former actress. She first became a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1992, and currently represents Hampstead and Kilburn.

As a professional actress from the late 1950s, she spent four years as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1964, being particularly associated with the work of director Peter Brook. During her film career, she won two Academy Awards for Best Actress: for Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973). She appeared in several other award-winning performances such as Alex in the film Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and the BBC television serial Elizabeth R (also 1971); for the latter she received an Emmy.

Before 2010, Jackson was the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, and early in the government of Tony Blair served as a Junior Transport minister from 1997 to 1999, later becoming critical of Blair. After constituency boundary changes for the 2010 general election, her majority of 42 votes was one of the closest results of the entire election.[2]  She announced in 2011 that she will stand down as an MP at the next general election.



Contents
[hide]  *1 Early life and career  ==Early life and career[ edit] == Jackson was born in Birkenhead on the Wirral, Cheshire where her father was a builder, and her mother worked in shops and as a cleaner.[3]  Jackson was educated at the West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls, and performed at a YMCA drama group during her teens.[3]  She worked for two years in a branch of the Boots the Chemist chain before taking up a scholarship in 1954 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.[4]
 * 2 From 1969 to 1980
 * 3 Later acting career
 * 4 Career in politics
 * 5 Personal life and honours
 * 6 Filmography
 * 7 Awards
 * 8 References
 * 9 External links

Jackson made her professional stage debut in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables in 1957 while at RADA.[5]  and appeared in repertory for the next six years.[6]  Her film debut was a bit part in This Sporting Life (1963). A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for four years from 1964, she originally joined for director Peter Brook's 'Theatre of Cruelty' season which included Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade (1965) in which she played an inmate of an asylum portraying Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-7" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[7]  The production ran on Broadway in 1965 and in Paris<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Oxford_6-1" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[6]  (Jackson appeared in the 1967 film version) and as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet in the same year.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-8" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[8]  Critic Penelope Gilliatt thought Jackson was the only Ophelia she had seen who was ready to play the Prince himself.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-9" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[9]  The RSC's staging at the Aldwych Theatre of US (1966), a protest play against the Vietnam War, also featured Jackson, and she appeared in its film version, Tell Me Lies.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-10" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[10] ==From 1969 to 1980<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">Jackson's starring role in Ken Russell's film of Women in Love (1969) led to her winning her first Academy Award for Best Actress. Brian McFarlane, the main author of The Encyclopedia of British Film, has written: "Her blazing intelligence, sexual challenge and abrasiveness were at the service of a superbly written role in a film with a passion rare in the annals of British cinema."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-McFarlane_11-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[11]  In the process of gaining funding for The Music Lovers (1970) from United Artists, Russell explained it as "the story of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac",<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[12]  the couple being the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and Antonina Miliukova played by Jackson. This film received mixed reviews in the U.S.: the anonymous reviewer in Variety wrote of the two principals "Their performances are more dramatically bombastic than sympathetic, or sometimes even believable".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[13] Jackson was initially interested in the role of Sister Jeanne in The Devils (1971), Russell's next film, but turned it down after script rewrites and deciding that she did not wish to play a third neurotic character in a row.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[14]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In order to play Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC's serial, Elizabeth R (1971), Jackson had her head shaved. After the series was shown on PBS in the US, Jackson received two Emmy Awards for her performance. She also portrayed Queen Elizabeth in the film Mary, Queen of Scots, and gained a BAFTA for her role in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (both 1971).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[15]  In that year British exhibitors voted her the 6th most popular star at the British box office,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-16" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[16]  and she appeared in a comedy sketch as Cleopatra for The Morecambe and Wise Show.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">Filmmaker Melvin Frank saw her comedic potential and offered her the lead female role in his next project. She gained a second Academy Award for Best Actress for A Touch of Class (1973). She continued to work in the theatre, and returned to the RSC to play the lead role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. A later film version directed by Nunn was released as Hedda (1975) for which Jackson was nominated for an Oscar.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">For her appearance on The Muppet Show she told the producers that she would perform any material they liked; this turned out to be a role where she has a delusion that she is a pirate captain who hijacks the Muppet Theatre as her ship. ==Later acting career<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In 1985, she appeared on Broadway as Nina Leeds in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude at the Nederlander Theatre in a production which had originated in London the previous year and ran for eight weeks.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Chambers_3-2" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[3]  John Beaufort for The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "Bravura is the inevitable word for Miss Jackson's display of feminine wiles and brilliant technique."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-17" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[17]  Frank Rich, in The New York Times thought Jackson, "with her helmet of hair and gashed features", when Leeds is a young woman, "looks like a cubist portrait of Louise Brooks", and later when the character has aged several decades, is "mesmerizing as a Zelda Fitzgeraldesque neurotic, a rotting and spiteful middle-aged matron and, finally, a spent, sphinx-like widow happily embracing extinction."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-18" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[18]  Herbert Wise directed a British television version of O'Neill's drama which was first broadcast in the US as part of PBS's American Playhouse in January 1988.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-19" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[19]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In 1989, Jackson appeared in Ken Russell's The Rainbow, playing Anna Brangwen, mother of Gudrun, the part which had won her her first Academy Award twenty years earlier. Also in that year she played Martha in a Los Angeles production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Doolittle Theatre (now the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre). Directed by the playwright himself, this staging featuredJohn Lithgow as George. Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Jackson and Lithgow performed "with the assurance of dedicated character assassins, not your hire-and-salary types" with the actors being able to display their character's capacity for antipathy.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-20" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[20]  Albee was disappointed with this production, pointing to Jackson whom he thought "had retreated back to the thing she can do very well, that ice cold performance. I don't know whether she got scared, but in rehearsal she was being Martha, and the closer we got to opening the less Martha she was!".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-21" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[21]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">She performed the lead role in Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution as Galactia, a sixteenth century female Venetian artist, at the Almeida Theatre in 1990.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-22" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[22]  It was an adaptation of Barker's 1984 radio play in which Jackson had played the same role.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-23" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[23] ==Career in politics<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">Jackson retired from acting in order to stand for election to the House of Commons in the 1992 general election subsequently becoming the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate. Following a period as shadow minister for transport, following the 1997 general election, she was appointed as parliamentary under secretary of state (a junior minister) in the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Debretts_24-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[24]  with responsibility for London Transport, a post from which she resigned in 1999 before an unsuccessful attempt to be nominated as the Labour Party candidate for the election of the first Mayor of London in 2000. In the 2005 general election, she received 14,615 votes, representing 38.29% of the votes cast in the constituency.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">As a high profile backbencher she became a regular critic of Blair over his plans to introduce higher education tuition fees in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. She also called for him to resign following the Judicial Enquiry by Lord Hutton in 2003 surrounding the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the death of government adviser Dr. David Kelly. Jackson was generally considered to be a traditional left-winger, often disagreeing with the dominant Blairite governing Third Way faction in the Labour Party.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">By October 2005, her problems with Blair's leadership swelled to a point where she threatened to challenge the Prime Minister as a stalking horse candidate in a leadership contest if he did not stand down within a reasonable amount of time. On 31 October 2006, Jackson was one of 12 Labour MPs to back Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party's call for an inquiry into the Iraq War.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-25" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[25]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">Her constituency boundaries changed for the 2010 general election. The Gospel Oak and Highgate wards became part of Holborn & St Pancras, and the new Hampstead & Kilburn constituency switched into Brent to include Brondesbury, Kilburn and Queens Park wards (from the old Brent East and Brent South seats). On 6 May 2010, Jackson was elected as the MP for the new Hampstead and Kilburn constituency with a margin of 42 votes over Conservative Chris Philp with the Liberal Democrat candidate Edward Fordham less than a thousand votes behind them. She had the second closest result and second smallest majority of any MP in the 2010 election.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In June 2011, Jackson announced that, presuming the Parliament elected in 2010 lasts until 2015, she will not seek re-election. She explained "I will be almost 80 and by then it will be time for someone else to have a turn".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-reelection_26-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[26]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In April 2013, Jackson gave a speech in parliament over discussion about the passing of Margaret Thatcher.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-27" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[27]  In a scathing speech criticising Thatcher's policies, she accused Thatcher of treating "vices as virtues" and stated that because of Thatcherism England was susceptible to unprecedented unemployment rates and homelessness.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-28" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[28] ==Personal life and honours<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">Jackson has a son, Dan Hodges, born in 1969 from her marriage to Roy Hodges; he is a Labour Party advisor and commentator.,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-pr_29-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[29]  and a well-known political blogger who describes himself as a "Blairite cuckoo".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-30" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[30]  She was five months pregnant when filming on Women in Love was completed.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-imdb_31-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[31]  Her marriage to Hodges lasted from 1958 until their divorce in 1976.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-time_32-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[32]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:20.363636016845703px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;">In 1978, she was awarded an CBE. ==Filmography<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == ==Awards<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] ==
 * 2006: Ibsen Centennial Commemoration Award