Oscar-winning actress and former MP Glenda Jackson has died at the age of 87, her agent has said.
Jackson became an international star in the 1970s, winning Oscars for Women In Love and A Touch of Class, and receiving two further nominations.
She was one of the few artists to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, three Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1978.
She also starred as Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC drama Elizabeth R.
Politics was always important, and she gave up acting to join the House of Commons as a Labour MP in north London from 1992 to 2015. That included two years as a junior transport minister in Tony Blair’s New Labour government from 1997.
Screen career of Glenda Jackson
She later returned to the screen, winning a Bafta for her comeback role in the TV drama Elizabeth Is Missing in 2020.
Born in the western town of Birkenhead in England in 1936, Jackson joined an amateur theater group as a teenager before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
After graduating she starred on London’s West End and made her Broadway debut in 1965 in a production of “Marat/Sade.”
She won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada) in London, and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963.
After making her name on stage, she won her first Oscar for playing a headstrong artist in director Ken Russell’s film of DH Lawrence’s novel Women in Love.
Her second Academy Award came three years later for A Touch of Class, a romantic comedy in which she played s fashion designer caught up in a catastrophic love affair with a US businessman.
She did not attend either ceremony, though, saying she was busy.
“All awards are very nice to have,” she told BBC Radio 4‘s This Cultural Life last year. “But they don’t make you any better.”
In 1978, she scored box office success in the United States in the romantic comedy House Calls, co-starring Walter Matthau, with the film spending two weeks at No. 1 in the US box-office rankings. House Calls was the biggest box-office hit of her career in the US.
In July 2022, the British Film Institute celebrated her film and television career with a month-long retrospective season at the BFI Southbank in London. As well as screenings of her work, the programme included Glenda Jackson in Conversation, in which she was interviewed about her career live on stage by broadcaster John Wilson
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