The legendary British actor and politician Glenda Jackson has died at the age of 87, a representative confirmed earlier today. “[She] died peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, this morning after a brief illness with her family at her side,” her agent, Lionel Lerner, wrote in a statement. The two-time Academy Award-winning star was as well-known for her commanding performances across stage and screen as she was for her life-long commitment to political action, taking a lengthy hiatus from acting to serve as the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn in London from 1992 to 2015. In 2018, she returned to Broadway with a triumphant performance in a revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, which saw her win her first Tony Award for best actress in a play at the age of 82.
In honor of Jackson’s towering legacy, here revisit an interview with Jackson and her Three Tall Women co-star, Ruth Wilson, from Vogue’s April 2019 issue.
The theater director Sam Gold has become the go-to guy for powerfully spare productions that forgo showy stage tricks to put the focus on the writing and the acting: Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-winning The Flick; a radically stripped-down The Glass Menagerie; the Tony-winning chamber musical Fun Home. Two seasons ago, Gold staged a thrilling (and acclaimed) production of Othello starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo and followed up with an intimate take on Hamlet starring Oscar Isaac. Since then, he has vowed to mount all Shakespeare’s tragedies. “They’ve just become kind of the only thing I want to do,” Gold says. “They’re such challenges for a director, and they’re the greatest roles for the greatest actors. And when you have the opportunity to work with the best actors, you want to give them a huge meal.”
This month, Gold is serving up what he calls “the greatest feast there is”—that would be King Lear—to one of our finest living actors, Glenda Jackson, who at 82 leads a stellar cast—including Ruth Wilson, Elizabeth Marvel, and Jayne Houdyshell—in Jackson’s return to Broadway after last season’s Tony-winning triumph in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. She is the latest in a long line of acting titans to conquer Lear, from Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud, and Paul Scofield to Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, and Simon Russell Beale. “This is a perfect meeting of actor and role,” Gold says. “Who else carries that much power at that age and has that much capacity for all the layers of experience that this character gets put through? She’s fiercely intelligent, she knows how to argue, and she knows how to make that argument hurt—all things that are very true of King Lear. But there’s also a capacity in her performances for a kind of cruelty that audiences love to watch.”
Audiences have been fixing a rapt gaze on Jackson ever since she electrified the West End (and, later, Broadway) as a homicidal madwoman in Peter Brook’s notorious 1964 staging of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. She famously lashed de Sade with her hair, thus setting the tone for her on-screen relationships with her leading men in such films as Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), in which she plays a ruthless libertine who drives Oliver Reed’s character to suicide. With her off-kilter beauty, Jackson seemed an unlikely movie star, but her elegance, charisma, and emotional sinew made her an icon of the ’70s screen, earning her Oscars for her performances in Women in Love and the bittersweet 1973 romantic comedy A Touch of Class, along with a BAFTA for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).
In 1992, incensed by the cruel policies of Margaret Thatcher, Jackson left behind a thriving acting career for politics, serving as a Labour party MP in the House of Commons for 23 years. After retiring in 2015 she traveled to Barcelona, where she saw a production of King Lear starring her friend, the legendary Catalan actress Núria Espert, who suggested that Jackson take a crack at the role. “My honest reaction was, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ” Jackson says. “ ‘They’d never allow me to do this in England. A woman playing Lear?’ ” Soon, though, Matthew Warchus offered her a chance to do just that in a modern-dress production directed by Deborah Warner at London’s Old Vic. It was a triumph, earning Jackson critical rapture and an Evening Standard Theatre Award—which, unlike her Oscars, she even showed up to accept, tut-tutting the standing ovation she received and puckishly noting, “When I was feeding myself by being a professional actress, I never got a good notice in The Evening Standard.”
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