I thought I had seen Glenda Jackson at the peak of her career: in 2016, when she played King Lear. She, on the other hand, declared her acting “apotheosis” to be her appearance on The Morecambe & Wise Show. She had left the stage to become an MP in 1992, so her triumphant return at the age of 80 was my only chance of writing about her. It was a mighty occasion: I just wish I had seen more.
I had watched her on film, gleaming in Sunday Bloody Sunday, and on the telly, withered and chalk-faced as Elizabeth I. I would love to have seen her playing Eliza Doolittle in 1956, and, nine years later, as Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade; she considered Brook to be Britain’s greatest theatre director. I wish I had seen her firing pistols in Hedda Gabler in 1975, and, in 1989, heard her rail in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Her superb Lear was a summit in a crucial year for women on stage: it also included Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare productions. There were grumbles: the playwright Ronald Harwood was not alone in thinking it “astonishingly stupid” to cast women in traditional male roles. Jackson made the gender question look irrelevant.
She cleavered her way through the part. Her voice was sandpaper, her movement gliding. Nothing was wasted, nothing was superfluous. She made King Lear, with its great speeches on behalf of the exiled and unhoused, look like Shakespeare’s play for today. Yet there were no winks by the Thatcher-hater at present-day derelictions. Nor any easy appeals for compassion: she charted the path to madness without tearful quavering. Fury and scorn propelled her: the curses were relished, delivered in a voice like a football rattle; even her emotions were treated like unruly subordinates. With concentration like a blowtorch, she made sense of a moment which can baffle. Lear’s servant Kent tells the toppled king he sees “authority” in his face. That is often hard to believe amid the shambles. Jackson compelled an audience to recognise that authority: it shone out of every line and gesture.
A few months later she won the Critics Circle prize for the best Shakespearean performance. I presented it to her and realised that any prize was a benign irrelevance for her. People often say they don’t care about awards: Jackson really did not. Neither gushing nor contemptuous, she accepted with a slightly Edwardian turn of phrase: “Thank you kindly.”
Her aims for the theatre were high and trenchantly expressed. She thought acting was about trying to find the truth, not about pretending, and considered the stage an “allegory for an ideal society”: a circle made up of strangers standing in the light and strangers sitting in the dark, with energy going from one to another, reinforcing both. Her choice on Desert Island Discs reflected the mixture in her own acting of rigour, control – and wildness. She began with Tina Turner. And she chose Hound Dog, comparing Elvis Presley’s effect to that of a great actor. He – or she – can touch “something central about what it means to be alive”. Susannah Clapp Theatre critic for the Observer
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I did that weird thing when I first met Glenda Jackson of pretending not to care. Yes, I’d watched Women in Love a dozen times (my excuse was it was our English set text). I’d seen her writhe naked on the floor of the railway carriage in The Music Lovers and I’d laughed along with more than half the nation at her sand dance with Morecambe and Wise. I’d even seen her play Cleopatra in a terrible production at Stratford. But I wasn’t going to let on that I was in the slightest bit interested in any of that. Because Glenda was the Labour candidate in Hampstead and Highgate – a key seat in the upcoming general election – and I was Frank Dobson’s election agent in the next door seat. So we talked about road groups and the campaign strategy, not her friendship with Bette Davis.
And besides, Glenda reeked of not caring about things like fame, hierarchy or authority. What she believed in was work. Hard work. Work that got things done. Work that cleaned up messes (or for that matter, tidied up flats). Makeup and posh frocks were only any use as part of a costume. She cared about injustice, too. She loathed what Margaret Thatcher had done to the country, she despaired at poverty in Africa, she hated human rights abuses at home or abroad – and she was utterly disparaging of the war in Iraq.
She didn’t care for flattery – and she didn’t like to dole it out, either. When the local party members started grumbling, Frank’s daughter Sally and I suggested she should send them a Christmas card. “But I don’t believe in Christmas cards,” she said. Instead, she hand-wrote personal messages on more than 2,000 “Glenda Jackson” cards. It took her days. We stuffed and addressed them and left them overnight in the office, only to come in the next day to find there had been a flood from an upstairs bathroom. They were all ruined. We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell her. Months later she said: “I told you those cards were a waste of time. Literally nobody has mentioned them.”
She could be tough. At one point in the campaign we had a row about how aggressively to attack the Tory candidate, Oliver Letwin, who had foolishly boasted somewhere that he had “invented” the poll tax. A leaflet was drafted which laid the blame squarely at his feet. I can’t remember who thought it was too harsh, but Glenda was fiercely in favour of taking the fight to the Tories. They deserved everything they had coming to them.
I’ve heard people say she was “old Labour”. That’s not quite right. She was proud of her working-class upbringing in Birkenhead, West Kirby and Hoylake. That’s what gave her such a strong work ethic. She had to struggle when she started out in theatre and she knew poverty was a scourge, not a necessary evil. But she also knew Labour could never afford cheap sentimentalism. She was devastated when she won Hampstead in 1992, but Labour lost across the country. Power was worth the compromises.
Two other things inspired her particular brand of politics. She told me (when I was writing her biography) that every man she had ever been with had beaten her. No wonder she cared passionately about women’s rights. And when I visited her co-star in the medical comedy film House Calls, Walter Matthau, he told me that she was a passionate believer in “socialised medicine” (ie the NHS) because it had saved her life and because she believed that health should never be traded as a commodity, but treated as a universal right. Chris Bryant Labour MP for Rhondda and author of Glenda Jackson: the Biography
