Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)

Glenda Jackson by Bill Brandt (1971)

Growing up as an Army brat, I rarely got to see films when they opened but going to college changed all that.  Almost as soon as I arrived in New York City I bought a ticket for Sunday, Bloody Sunday at a theater on the Upper East Side with my new best friend, Leslie Lesperance.  I suspect we wanted to see the movie for the same unexpressed reasons, camouflaged by our appreciation for Glenda Jackson, perhaps the most lauded young actress of her time, who had just won her first Academy Award for Women In Love.  She made me feel sorrier for Alex than Daniel, both of whom are left behind by the same young man they love, a true testament to her talent.

And then I saw The Music Lovers, Ken Russell's fever dream about Tchaikovsky's marriage to a nymphomaniac played by, you guessed it, Glenda Jackson with, wait for it . . . Dr. Kildare, oops I mean Richard Chamberlain as her homosexual husband.  It's a crazy, crazy film and Jackson's utter lack of restraint is absolutely mesmerizing.  

A couple of years later, she won her second Oscar for A Touch Of Class proving that she could play comedy as well as neuroses.  She also got to have an affair with Helmut Berger, another gay icon, in The Romantic Englishman.  I think on some level I wanted to be Glenda Jackson.  She had yet to turn 40

In short, Ms. Jackson was on a hot streak, one of the hottest of my lifetime, powered by excellence at her craft, not celebrity.  But within a decade she pretty much gave up acting for politics at the top of her game.  Why Glenda, why?  But it turned out she was pretty good at that, too, if not quite popular enough to get her party's nomination for London's first mayor in 2000 but then again, we've seen what it can take to get that.  Although she served in the House of Commons for nearly 25 years, I knew only that she was old-school Labour and wasn't afraid of biting Bush's poodle.

Less than ten years ago, she resumed acting and won her only Tony Award for her role in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women.  I have few regrets in my life, but not seeing her perform live in that or in King Lear, her final, gender-bending appearance on Broadway--is one of them.  So few people achieve greatness, but Ms. Jackson, clearly a very serious person, did.  Only Patti Smith has had a comparable trajectory in my book.