Glenda Jackson, actor and politician, 1936 — 2023

Glenda Jackson, the award-winning actor and Labour politician who has died aged 87, had a remarkable three-act career. Each act was characterised by a fearlessness that drew both admiration and censure.

Jackson, the oldest of four daughters, was born in Birkenhead in 1936 to Joan, a cleaner, and Harry, a bricklayer. She left school at 15, and spent some time working at Boots. After a brief stint with a local amateur dramatics society, she applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she took up a place thanks to a scholarship.

Others with her background might have sought safe, bankable roles. But Jackson, who once said she did not “like audiences”, on the grounds that “they mostly want what they have liked before”, had more eclectic taste. Her early career was in repertory theatre, which is also where she met and married Roy Hodges, a stage manager, with whom she had one son.

The 1970s were a time of dazzling success for Jackson — she won two Oscars, in 1971 for Women in Love and in 1974 for A Touch of Class, though she chose not to attend either ceremony. She later said she gave both statuettes to her mother, who used them as bookends. In between those Oscars, she won her first Bafta for Sunday, Bloody Sunday and Emmy awards for her stunning performance as Elizabeth I in the BBC’s timeless mini-series, Elizabeth R. Her romantic life, however, was in flux: she and Hodges divorced in 1976.

The 1980s marked the beginning of Jackson’s transition into her second act, as a Labour politician. She was an enthusiastic champion of Neil Kinnock’s modernisation of the Labour party, and an outspoken critic of the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist group which then dominated the politics of Merseyside, where she had grown up. She sent Kinnock a congratulatory note after his 1985 speech condemning the group, and appeared in adverts as part of the party’s glossy 1986 “jobs and industry” campaign.

Jackson was widely sought after by local Labour parties, receiving entreaties from several constituencies, including the ultra-safe seat of Leeds East, where the former chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, was retiring. She opted in the end to seek the nomination in the marginal constituency of Hampstead and Highgate (later Hampstead and Kilburn). She won the seat with an above-average swing, despite the party’s general election defeat.

Although Jackson voted for Tony Blair in the 1994 leadership election and served as one of his ministers until 1999, she in many ways came to embody Labour’s “soft left”: a group which did so much of the heavy lifting to drag the party back into office in the 1980s and 1990s, but which came to be personally and politically disillusioned with Blair. In later years, she pronounced herself satisfied with Keir Starmer’s leadership, while urging him to try and improve his “one big drawback”: his voice.

Her own remarkable voice was evident in her most memorable appearance at the House of Commons. She used the 2013 debate to commemorate the death of Margaret Thatcher to deliver a blistering speech condemning the late prime minister. The decision scandalised many in Westminster, embarrassed some in Labour, but delighted others. The review that will have pleased her above all was the affectionate tribute in the Telegraph from her son, the opinion columnist Dan Hodges.

Jackson’s delivery was a reminder that she had lost none of her talent as an actor — an occupation she returned to in her third and final act. After leaving politics in 2015, she played Lear in a widely praised performance in 2016, which one critic likened to “a mountaineer returning to the fray with an assault on Everest”. She won a further Bafta, and another Emmy, for the central role in Elizabeth is Missing, and completed her final film, The Great Escaper, shortly before her death.

Throughout her time on stage and while representing a north London constituency in the House of Commons, she remained a resident of Blackheath in south London, in the home she had owned since the 1970s. In recent years, she occupied a basement flat in that same house, rising to have dinner with her family and to argue about politics with her son, who likened his mother’s living arrangement to “a reverse Mrs Rochester”.

Some in the Labour party remained confused that Jackson never traded her flat for a residence in her constituency, which contains many of the capital’s most desirable houses. But those who knew her understood: remaining in Blackheath meant staying, as she did in her final days, in the company of her family.

In two industries which tend to chew people up and spit them out, Jackson managed to win the lasting affection of the public. This was due, in part, to her remarkable ability to act — and speak — without fear.