81 Facts About Glenda Jackson

Glenda May Jackson was born on 9 May 1936 and is an English actress and former Member of Parliament.

Glenda Jackson is one of the few artists to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, three Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award.

Glenda Jackson was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1978.

Glenda Jackson has won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice: for her role in Women in Love and A Touch of Class.

Glenda Jackson won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Glenda Jackson received the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her role in Elizabeth Is Missing.

Glenda Jackson received five Laurence Olivier Award nominations for her West End roles in Stevie, Antony and Cleopatra, Rose, Strange Interlude, and King Lear, the later being her first role after a 25 year absence from acting, which she reprised on Broadway in 2019.

Glenda Jackson won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in the revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women.

Glenda Jackson took a hiatus from acting to take on a career in politics from 1992 to 2015, and was elected as the Labour Party MP for Hampstead and Highgate in the 1992 general election.

Glenda Jackson served as a junior transport minister from 1997 to 1999 during the government of Tony Blair, later becoming critical of Blair.

Glenda Jackson stood down at the 2015 general election, and returned to acting.

Glenda Jackson was born at 151 Market Street in Birkenhead, Cheshire on Saturday 9 May 1936.

Glenda Jackson's mother named her after the Hollywood film star Glenda Farrell.

Glenda Jackson's family were very poor, and lived in a two-up, two-down house at 21 Lake Place with an outside toilet.

Glenda Jackson's father Harry was a builder, while her mother Joan worked on the local supermarket checkout, pulled pints in a pub, and was a domestic cleaner.

Glenda Jackson worked for two years in Boots the Chemists, before winning a scholarship in 1954 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Glenda Jackson moved to the capital to begin the course in early 1955.

In January 1957, Glenda Jackson made her professional stage debut in Ted Willis's Doctor in the House at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing.

Glenda Jackson was a stage manager at Crewe in repertory theatre.

From 1958 to 1961, Glenda Jackson went through a period of two and a half years in which she was unable to find acting work.

Glenda Jackson unsuccessfully auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and undertook what she later described as "a series of soul-destroying jobs".

Glenda Jackson worked as a Bluecoat at Butlin's Pwllheli holiday resort on the Llyn Peninsula in North West Wales, where her new husband and fellow actor Roy Hodges was a Redcoat.

Glenda Jackson eventually returned to repertory theatre in Dundee, but worked in bars in between acting jobs.

Glenda Jackson made her film debut in a bit part in the kitchen sink drama This Sporting Life.

Glenda Jackson appeared as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet the same year.

Critic Penelope Gilliatt thought Glenda Jackson was the only Ophelia she had seen who was ready to play the Prince himself.

Glenda Jackson was initially interested in the role of Sister Jeanne in The Devils, Russell's next film, but turned it down after script rewrites and deciding that she did not wish to play a third neurotic character in a row.

Glenda Jackson played Queen Elizabeth in the film Mary, Queen of Scots; and gained an Academy Award nomination as well as a BAFTA Award for her role in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Glenda Jackson's popularity was such that 1971 saw her receive Best Film Actress awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain, the New York Film Critics and the US National Society of Film Critics.

Glenda Jackson made the first of several appearances with Morecambe and Wise in their 1971 Christmas special.

Filmmaker Melvin Frank saw Glenda Jackson's comedy skills on the Morecambe and Wise Show and offered her the lead female role in his romantic comedy A Touch of Class, co-starring George Segal, which was a UK box-office No 1 in June 1973.

Glenda Jackson continued to work in the theatre, returning to the RSC for the lead in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

In November 1984, Glenda Jackson appeared in the title role of Robert David MacDonald's English translation of Racine's Phedre, titled Phedra, at The Old Vic.

Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman was intrigued that Glenda Jackson didn't go in for nobility, but played Racine's feverish queen as if to say that "being skewered in the guts by Cupid is an ugly, bitter, humiliating business".

The costume which Prowse designed for Glenda Jackson's performance is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and iconic photographs of Glenda Jackson in the role can be found online.

In 1989, Glenda Jackson appeared in Ken Russell's The Rainbow, playing Anna Brangwen, mother of Gudrun, the part for which she had won her first Academy Award twenty years earlier.

Glenda Jackson performed the lead role in Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution as Galactia, a sixteenth century female Venetian artist, at the Almeida Theatre in 1990.

In 2015, Glenda Jackson returned to acting following a 23-year absence, having retired from politics.

Glenda Jackson returned to the stage at the end of 2016, playing the title role in William Shakespeare's King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre in London, in a production running from 25 October to 3 December.

Glenda Jackson was nominated for Best Actress at the Olivier Awards for her role, but ultimately lost out to Billie Piper.

Glenda Jackson did win the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress at the 2017 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performance.

In 2018, Glenda Jackson returned to Broadway in a revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, winning the 2018 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Glenda Jackson returned to the role of King Lear on Broadway in a production that opened in April 2019.

Glenda Jackson is going to endure this, and you're going to witness it.

In 2019, after a 27-year absence, Glenda Jackson returned to television drama, portraying an elderly grandmother struggling with dementia in Elizabeth Is Missing on BBC One, based on the novel of the same name by Emma Healey, for which she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress and International Emmy Award for Best Actress.

Caine and Glenda Jackson previously starred together in The Romantic Englishwoman.

Glenda Jackson joined the Labour Party in the early 1950s, at the age of 16.

Glenda Jackson was on the executive of the National Association of Voluntary Hostels, and spoke at rallies for the housing charity Shelter.

Glenda Jackson was involved in children's charities, as president of the Toy Libraries Association and narrating programmes for UNICEF.

Glenda Jackson gave her time and money to a home for emotionally disturbed children in Berkshire run by former actress Coral Atkins.

Glenda Jackson supported Dr Una Kroll's Women's Rights candidacy for Sutton and Cheam at the October 1974 general election.

Glenda Jackson had considered becoming a social worker, and in 1979 began a social science degree at the Open University, but dropped out a few months later after falling behind with her essays.

Glenda Jackson appeared in a number of charity films, including on behalf of International Year of the Child, Voluntary Service Overseas and Oxfam.

Glenda Jackson's name was linked to several parliamentary seats over the years; she was approached by a Constituency Labour Party in Bristol to stand at the 1979 general election, but this did not materialise.

Glenda Jackson was a member of the Arts for Labour group.

In 1986, Glenda Jackson visited Ethiopia as part of Oxfam's efforts to help with the famine there, and in 1989 she approached VSO about the chance of working in Africa for a couple of years.

Glenda Jackson got involved in the African National Congress campaign against apartheid in South Africa, and in September 1988 chaired a United Nations committee on the cultural boycott.

Glenda Jackson appeared in a party political broadcast for Labour in February 1987.

In December 1989, it was rumoured that Glenda Jackson had been approached by two branches of Leeds East CLP to succeed their Labour MP, Denis Healey.

Glenda Jackson has since stated that she felt Britain was being "destroyed" by the policies of the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative government, so that she was willing to do "anything that was legal" to oppose her.

Glenda Jackson was replaced by John Major, who would lead the party into the next general election.

Glenda Jackson retired from acting in 1991 in order to devote herself to politics full-time as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Highgate.

Glenda Jackson resigned from the post in 1999 before an unsuccessful attempt to be nominated as the Labour candidate for the election of the first Mayor of London in 2000.

Glenda Jackson was re-elected to represent her constituency at the 2001 general election.

Glenda Jackson called for him to resign following the Judicial Enquiry by Lord Hutton in 2003 surrounding the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the death of government adviser Dr David Kelly.

On 31 October 2006, Glenda Jackson was one of 12 Labour MPs to back Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party's call for an inquiry into the Iraq War.

On 6 May 2010, Glenda Jackson was elected as the MP for the new Hampstead and Kilburn constituency by a margin of 42 votes over Conservative Chris Philp, with the Liberal Democrat candidate Edward Fordham less than a thousand votes behind them.

Glenda Jackson had the closest result in England, and the second smallest majority of any MP at the 2010 election.

Glenda Jackson's seat was marginal for most of her time in politics, with the 1997 election being the only occasion on which she received an absolute majority of votes cast in the constituency.

In June 2011, Glenda Jackson announced that, presuming the Parliament elected in 2010 lasted until 2015, she would not seek re-election.

Glenda Jackson accused Thatcher of treating "vices as virtues" and stated that, because of Thatcherism, the UK was susceptible to unprecedented unemployment rates and homelessness.

Glenda Jackson is a socialist, and was generally considered to be a traditional left-winger during her political career, often disagreeing with the dominant Blairite governing Third Way faction in the Labour Party; she rebelled against her party in parliamentary votes on a number of occasions.

Glenda Jackson labelled Militant and Derek Hatton's politics as "self-indulgent crap", and she sent leader Neil Kinnock a congratulatory telegram after his high-profile 1985 Labour Party conference speech, in which he criticised the activities of Militant et al.

Glenda Jackson has been an outspoken feminist, criticising the lack of gender equality for women.

Glenda Jackson voiced her support for Blair's successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, in 2008.

Glenda Jackson has stated that she supported him "as a person", and would have nominated him in the 2015 leadership election.

Glenda Jackson subsequently changed her mind on the issue and supported Britain remaining in the European Union in the 2016 referendum.

In 1957, Glenda Jackson met Roy Hodges, a stage manager and fellow actor in their repertory theatre company.

In 1969, their son, Daniel, was born; Glenda Jackson was six months pregnant when filming on Women in Love was completed.

Glenda Jackson's marriage was running into difficulties by the early 1970s, and in 1975, she began an affair with Andy Phillips, the lighting director for a production of Hedda Gabler which she was starring in.

Glenda Jackson listed her interests in Who's Who as cooking, gardening and reading Jane Austen.