British star Glenda Jackson has died after a long career in theater and politics: NPR

British actress Glenda Jackson in April 1974 (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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British actress Glenda Jackson in April 1974 (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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Glenda Jackson has passed away at the age of 87, after a short illness, according to her agent, Lionel Larner.

“One of the greatest actresses in the world passed away, and one of my best friends passed away, too,” he told NPR. He said Jackson died Thursday morning at her London home.

In addition to a distinguished career that included Academy Awards, Tonys, and Emmys, Jackson represented her London borough as a Member of Parliament’s House of Commons for 23 years.

Jackson has lived her life in three distinct works. The first and longest acting was as one of the best actresses of her generation. A blaze of the stage, she first attracted attention in 1964 with the Royal Shakespeare Company when she played Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s production of Marat / Sad, in a mental hospital. (She reprized the role in the 1967 film.)

Jackson’s success on stage translates into film. She starred in Ken Russell’s 1969 adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, women in love romantic comedy, A touch of sophisticationWith George Segal. She won Academy Awards for both films. Other roles included Sunday, Bloody Sunday And Mary Queen of Scots. Jackson also entered people’s homes as Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC series, Elizabeth R. , for which she won two Emmy Awards.

A trajectory of a woman who grew up among the working class poor, outside Liverpool, in a flat with an outside toilet. Jackson found her calling in acting with a group of amateurs, and ended up with a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“I learned that you are your instrument, and it is your voice, your shape, and how you move.” Jackson told Colin Grimshaw in a 1976 interview. “And that can be set and coordinated and kept in good shape, ready to handle acting, which is a mysterious process.”

NYU theater professor Lawrence Maslon said Jackson was a working class, female version of British contemporaries like Albert Finney, Michael Caine and Alan Bates. “They were the angry young men,” he said, “but she was kind of the angry young woman, I think.” “She definitely had the looks and the skill to move into film really quickly.”

But despite her great success on screen and stage — she starred in Eugene O’Neill’s five-hour play, strange terminatorin London and on Broadway – Jackson has admitted that her profession suffers from insecurities.

“I think the longer you act, the more you realize you don’t know,” Jackson told Grimshaw. “The odds of making the wrong choices are much greater than the odds of making the right ones. And that kind of fear is something you probably learn to control better, but it doesn’t grow any further.”

As she was settling into middle age, Jackson was already contemplating her second chapter. Jackson explained, “Sure, an actress’s life in movies is very short. And in the theatre, there’s a terrible trough when there are no parts worth playing.” “I mean, until you kind of get to about 60 and then you kind of break character parts. And I really can’t see myself hanging around for 20 years waiting to play an old kid on something.”

A lifelong supporter of the Labor Party, Jackson stood for Parliament in 1992 and won. When she resigned, after serving more than two decades, she told NPR in 2018, “I enjoyed the responsibilities of constituencies. I was very lucky. But I have to be honest, I don’t miss Parliament itself. I mean, I’ve seen my ego go up and down those corridors that It wouldn’t be tolerated for 30 seconds in a professional theatre.”

But in a moment of political theatre, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was eulogized in Parliament in 2013, Jackson seized the moment to lash out at her and was booed by the Tories on the back bench.

The third chapter for Glenda Jackson was her triumphant return to acting, well into her eighties. I starred in Elizabeth is missinga TV movie about a woman dealing with dementia, as King Lear in both London and New York, and in an Edward Albee movie Three tall womenfor which she won a Tony Award in 2018.

When asked about retirement in a 2019 interview on Why Fresh airJackson replied, “Well, if I hadn’t been offered a job, I’d be retired… I’ve had a good period.”

“I love gardening and I’m a grandmother, so I get to get a grandmother’s job, which is a fun experience,” added the British stage legend.