In memory of Glenda Jackson: ‘She touched something central about what it means to be alive’

Glenda Jackson in 1999, when she was the MP for Hampstead. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

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?