The British actress Glenda Jackson has died at the age of 87 after a prolific career that brought her the so-called triple crown of acting, the Oscars, Emmy and Tony awards (the first two, on more than one occasion), and in which she She even dared with politics, accumulating 23 years as a Labor deputy in the United Kingdom Parliament. Possessing a scathing tongue, Stakhanovite ethics and extraordinarily austere personality, the many accolades accumulated over decades of her career never mattered to her and, whenever she had the opportunity, she declared that, for her, the best award was her work.
Jackson died at her south-east London residence after a “brief illness”, according to her agent, who confirmed that, despite her health, the interpreter had recently managed to complete filming for The Great Escaper, which will be released at the end of this year and in which he worked with Michael Caine (90 years old). His acting prestige can only be compared to the fearsome reputation that, to his astonishment, inspired his indomitable character, his stinging verbiage and his determination to speak his mind openly. In his later years, he tried to debunk the myth of his ferocity, stressing that he had never sought confrontation and that his only interest was work, but decades of sharp statements and his reluctance to bite his tongue. they had forged the legend.
The daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner, the actress who played real and fictional monarchs, from Elizabeth I to William Shakespeare’s King Lear, lived for 15 years in a small house below that of her only son, the commentator politician Dan Hodges, with whom he acknowledged that they argued every night, given the gap between his conservative ideology and his mother’s left-wing and Republican affiliation. Winner of two Oscars (for women in lovein 1969, and One more touch of class in 1973), nor did he bother to go to the delivery ceremony, with the excuse that he was working, and he never wanted to enter the Hollywood game, aware that his appearance, his causticity and the characters he aspired to embody did not match. conformed to the canons of the industry. “If I’m too strong for some,” he went on to say, “it’s their problem.”
She herself recognized that her character had been forged during a difficult childhood in one of the most depressed areas in the north-east of England. Although her mother had chosen her name for actress Glenda Farrell, her arrival in acting, by her own admission, was more a product of boredom than a vocation. She dropped out of school at the age of 16 and, after spending two years working in the laxative section of a drugstore chain, now the British giant in the Boots sector, she took the advice of a friend to join the group. amateur theater at the YMCA, the youth organization of Christian origin, where his talent did not go unnoticed.
It was she who wrote to the renowned RADA (acronym in English for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), the only school she had ever heard of, and years later she would recount that, after passing the auditions, the center told her that, if they had the possibility, they would give him a scholarship. “The boss of Boots wrote to the town hall, which gave me a scholarship and, thus, I was able to study at the RADA,” she recounted. Her first big break came on stage, a year after joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1964, starring her in Peter Brook’s adaptation of Marat/Sadeby Peter Weiss, which would be transferred to Broadway and, in 1967, to the big screen, directed by Brook himself.
In the first third of the seventies, his two Oscars would arrive, the first thanks to his fruitful professional relationship with the director Ken Russell, with the adaptation of the novel by DH Lawrence women in love, notorious for the nude scenes that Jackson shared with Oliver Reed. The British actor had also tried to separate her from her project, for not considering her pretty enough, but later he would say that acting alongside her was like “being hit by a truck”.
It was also during this period that she played Elizabeth I in the BBC series Elizabeth R., for which she would receive one of the two Emmys that her interpretation of the so-called Virgin Queen brought her. True to her intense dedication to her characters, Jackson shaved her head to facilitate the makeup required for a role that spanned the British monarch’s transition from her princess years to the latter years of her life.
After collecting his second Oscar for a little more classwhere the chemistry with George Segal was evident, focused primarily on the theater: he returned triumphantly to the RSC to assume the title character of the play Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, under the direction of Trevor Nunn, who also handled the film adaptation. And 20 years after her Broadway debut, she once again had New York at her feet in strange interlude, by one of the classics of American playwriting, Eugene O’Neill, a challenge that meant four hours on stage for Jackson every night. The Tony award, however, would elude him until 2018, when, at 82, he won it for three tall womenby Edward Albee, making her one of 24 people to hold the triple crown of acting.
Her extraordinary legacy as an actress is even more unusual considering the break that, at the age of 56, with two Oscars, as many Emmys and a Golden Globe to her credit, she imposed on her acting career, although the awards would continue to rain down on her. after her return to acting in 2015. In 1992 she joined the House of Commons as a deputy, after a victory in the Hampstead and Highgate constituency that was one of the few joys that the Labor Party obtained in some generals that had given for won, and that, however, would give a fourth term to the conservatives. Her conquest for her was double, since she managed to reverse her result in a seat that had been held for two decades by the tories British; and in 1997, with Tony Blair’s first electoral victory, Jackson would even go so far as to enter the government, by assuming a secretary of state in the Ministry of Transport.
Like virtually every political career, hers was marked by ups and downs: her run for London mayor in 1999 failed, and her growing dissatisfaction with the so-called New Labor embodied by Blair made her one of the fiercest critical voices. of the then prime minister, especially after his decision to join the invasion of Iraq. As a deputy, she also suffered strong reproaches for her attendance rate in Parliament, but she claimed that she had always been in the big votes and that her priority was the citizens she represented. His most memorable moment was, presumably, his vicious attack on Margaret Thatcher in April 2013, when at a parliamentary session paying tribute to the Iron Lady after her death, Jackson condemned the “appalling social, economic and spiritual damage” inflicted by Thatcher. in the UK, an attack publicly criticized by his own son as “childish” and “self-indulgent”.
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