Double Oscar winner, anti-Thatcher and elected Labour, British actress Glenda Jackson is dead – Liberation

2023-06-15 13:35:53

Muse of Ken Russel, Glenda Jackson was 87 years old. She had abandoned theater and cinema in the early 1990s to devote herself to politics, on the side of Labor and the “poor, unemployed and sick”.

A militant actress, unless it’s the other way around. Glenda Jackson died on Thursday, June 15, in London, where she had spent a large part of her career as an actress first and then as a Labor politician.

At the age of 87, “Glenda Jackson, Oscar-winning actress and Labor Party winner died peacefully at her home in Blackheath this morning following a brief illness. His family was by his sideexplains his agent in a press release. She had just finished filming The Great Escaper, a film in which she played Michael Caine.

Ken Russel’s muse, she won her first Oscar in 1970 for Love, adaptation of DH Lawrence’s daring novel about the passionate relationship between two sisters and their lovers. She was “a sought-after figure of cinema that is different and not the same”, recalled Liberation in 2011 in the obituary devoted to Ken Russel. After Love (Women in Love in VO), “We find her shortly after (1971) in A Sunday Like Others, by John Schlesinger, where she lives in a threesome between her young lover and a mature man. Faithful to Ken Russell, she will be in the credits of some of his following films, including The Music Lovers, where she plays Tchaikovsky’s cheated wife.

In 1973, it was with comedy A mistress in the arms, a woman on the back that she won her second statuette thanks to her composition of a divorced woman trapped in an impossible love with a married man.

Born on May 9, 1936 in Birkenhead, a small port town opposite Liverpool (north-west England), this daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaning lady first worked as an employee in a pharmacy and then drama lessons for amateurs. Despite the lack of family support, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and went on tour. This is how director Peter Brook spotted her and hired her in 1963 to play his Ophelia in Hamlet.

After 35 years of career in theater and cinema, Glenda Jackson goes into politics to fight Margaret Thatcher whom she accuses of destroying British society. Elected in 1992 as a Labor MP for the London suburbs, she kept her constituency until 2015 and distinguished herself by her particular attention to “poor, unemployed and sick”. She was briefly part of a Tony Blair government in the transport portfolio between 1997 and 1999.

In 2010, she had “saved his place in Westminster narrowly, with only 42 votes more than the Tories, following the redistricting of the constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn. Member of the British Parliament since 1992, she has decided to retire. leaving his place to the young municipal councilor Tulip Siddiq, 32, wrote Libé.

Three years later, when Margaret Thatcher died, she had yielded to no nostalgic temptation, refusing to weave laurel wreaths for the Iron Lady. “What made me drop the cinema and enter politics was Margaret Thatcher, she said again last July, at 86, in the columns of the British newspaper Big Issue. She embodied the end of the opposite of what I thought and the worst way for the country to move forward.