Glenda Jackson, who has died aged 87, had a career unmatched by any of her contemporaries. From 1957 to 1992 she enjoyed huge success on stage, film (twice winning an Oscar) and television. From 1992 to 2015 she was a Labour MP, first for Hampstead and Highgate and then for the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, becoming a notably outspoken backbencher. In 2016 she returned to acting as a magnificent King Lear at the Old Vic, London; later, on Broadway, shewon a Tony award for her performance in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women.
Born in Birkenhead, Jackson first came to prominence in 1964, in an experimental Peter Brook Theatre of Cruelty season at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda), during which she was stripped naked, bathed and dressed in a prison uniform to the words of a report on the Christine Keeler case. Jackson went on to join the RSC, playing Charlotte Corday in Brook’s production of Marat/Sade and Ophelia to David Warner’s Hamlet at Stratford. Prophetically, Penelope Gilliatt began her review in the Observer by saying that Jackson was the first Ophelia who should have played Hamlet. “She makes Ophelia,” wrote Gilliatt, “exceptional and electric, with an intelligence that harasses the court and a scornful authority full of Hamlet’s own self-distaste.”
