When the death of Glenda Jackson was announced last Thursday, it was no surprise that one of the most popular clips doing the rounds on social media was not any of her interpretations of characters by Shakespeare, Ibsen, D.H. Lawrence or Edward Albee, but a monologue of her own composition delivered on the floor of the House of Commons, on the occasion of another formidable woman’s passing.
I’m not the first to note that the rhetorical power of Jackson’s denunciation of Thatcherism was heightened by her decades of practice delivering classical tirades on the stage. If you don’t know the speech, listen to it.
RSC vocal coaches like Cicely Berry urge their students to find the muscularity in classical language; they might as well use Jackson’s Parliamentary remarks as a set text. Note her dynamic use of antithesis:
We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice —and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue.
Those of us on the Left will experience an intellectual satisfaction from the critique that Jackson offers – but the glee in listening and re-listening to the speech (as I have many times) comes from the OTT flourishes in her cadences: ‘London became a city that HOGARTH would have recognised – and inDEED. HE. WOULD.’
(This speech alone makes the case for Glenda as a killer Snatch Game selection for Drag Race UK. Baga Chipz may have given us a memorably demonic Thatcher, but her real-life politics are quite flip-floppy, and it’s high time someone challenged her supremacy by repeatedly intoning the phrase ‘rolls and rolls of SELLOTAPE.’)
Jackson’s Ciceronian rhetorical style is a major component of why those remarks cut through the blather surrounding Thatcher’s memorial. One feels an additional thrill at the sheer force with which Glenda plows ahead, unfazed by boos from the Tory (and probably a few Labour) benches. She feels no need to modulate her tone out of reverence for the recently deceased.
In politics and in performance, Glenda Jackson never gave a toss about what other people thought of her.
Last week on Twitter, writer Isaac Butler suggested shadily that Jackson’s stage work was a ‘relic’ of an old-school, highly presentational mode of acting, akin to ‘visiting a diorama of pilgrims at the Natural History Museum.’
Whilst uncharitable, his analysis wasn’t exactly incorrect. I only saw Jackson perform live once, in her late-career turn as King Lear in 2016: the furious emotional states exhibited in that performance would not have seemed out of place on a nineteenth century stage.
Those of us who respond to Glenda Jackson’s performances rarely do so because of her versatility, her ability to disappear into a role.
Onstage, she was born to play the great dominating female parts: Cleopatra, Hedda, Bernarda Alba, Mother Courage, Martha. But never Blanche. In her most lauded film roles of the 1970s, Jackson could be more psychologically modulated but most of her heroines exuded a similar air of superiority – and a willingness to challenge men.
Whether in period literary adaptations (Women in Love), progressive contemporary dramas (Sunday Bloody Sunday) or frothy sex farces (A Touch of Class), one waits eagerly for the moment when Jackson’s character would let rip at the usually clueless or insensitive male she’d been paired with.
Few actors have enjoyed an intense streak of adulation quite like Jackson’s in the early 70s. The first and last of the performances mentioned above brought her two Best Actress Oscars in the space of four years (though, for my money, it’s her work in Sunday that holds up best today).
Even back then, however, it doesn’t seem like Jackson had much interest in ingratiating herself: she didn’t show up at the ceremony to accept either of her Oscars.
Lauded by her peers, she kept making left-field choices: lending her star power to the increasingly oddball camp directed by her old pal Ken Russell or to the TV sketch comedy of Morecambe and Wise.
And then she gave it all up for twenty-five years in politics.
Who is today’s Glenda Jackson? There isn’t one, and probably will never be. Unless Emma Thompson decides to give up acting and stand for Caroline Lucas’s seat in Brighton on the Green Party ticket at the next general election.
When an icon passes, it’s a commonplace to say that that no one will ever be quite like her, but in Glenda’s case it’s unquestionably true.
I’ve made a diagram to prove it:
Plenty of actors’ careers possess some of the attributes of Jackson’s. It’s pretty standard, for instance, to demonstrate your versatility by swapping between prestige drama and broad comedy.
It’s rarer nowadays to consistently shift between stage work and screen, but some still do. A rare few even take on the great roles of the European dramatic repetoire: Jessica Chastain, one year off of her Oscar win, played Ibsen’s Nora, as Jackson did with Hedda; having won Best Actress in 2014, Cate Blanchett then appeared with Isabelle Huppert in Genet’s The Maids, a 21st century answer to Jackson’s 1974 turn with Susannah York in the same play.
Of course, though, it’s her approach to politics that distinguishes Glenda Jackson from everybody else. Many, many celebrities take on roles as political advocates. Jackson’s contemporary (and Mary, Queen of Scots co-star) Vanessa Redgrave became a lightning rod for her support of Palestinian rights, never more so than when she used the platform of the Academy Awards to express her support for their cause.
Jackson’s mode of political engagement was of a different character altogether, though. Early on, like Redgrave, she leant her celebrity to causes ranging from abortion rights to famine relief. But eventually she eschewed mere celebrity grandstanding for the hard graft of electoral politics.
Jackson has said that her motivation for becoming an MP was simple: ‘Anything I could’ve done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher’s government out I was prepared to do.’ She was courted at multiple points to stand for the Labour Party in places like Bridgend or Leeds, before finally standing in 1990 for the seat in Hampstead & Highgate and taking it away from the Conservatives.
If Labour thought Jackson would inject glamour into their midst, however, they got something else. The trajectory of her decades as an MP consisted in a gradual move away from the spotlight. Initially, she flirted with high office, briefly holding a post as transport minister in the first Blair government. She stepped down from that to put herself forward in an unsuccessful bid to be Mayor of London.
Her ambition to rise in the ranks seems to have ended there. Instead, this internationally renowned actress settled into a role on the back benches, working on bread and butter issues. The concerns highlighted in her famous Thatcher speech — proper housing, affordable education, care for the vulnerable — have always formed the core of her socialist values:
My life was transformed by the Labour government of 1945. It was transformative for millions of people like me, you know – education, the health service. It was proof that politics can make life better for people; that a social dream can become a social reality by the power of government.
The same woman who’d done little to court the Academy also had no instinct to suck up to the party powers that be.
Whilst Jackson’s attack on Thatcher is better remembered now, she was often quite hostile to her own party leader’s policies, starting in 1998 when she opposed Labour’s move to introduce university tuition fees. Tony Blair is probably lucky that YouTube didn’t exist in 2003 or we might have viral trades to re-watch of Jackson’s calls for his resignation over the Hutton report. Three years later, she was one of only 12 Labour MPs who voted against his Government to establish an Enquiry into the Iraq War.
Not unlike Bernie Sanders, Jackson made a career out of steadfast Left-wing cantankerousness during the years of Third Way ascendancy. By the time she retired from politics in 2015, the old fashioned Labour values that she’d always espoused had become more fashionable amongst a younger generation who likely couldn’t name a single Jackson film of the 1970s.
In her final, post-politics years, Glenda Jackson cut a singular figure. She won late-career awards on stage and in television, as indomitable as ever, but without a trace of vanity. Londoners could spot her now frail figure trudging from Waterloo station to the Old Vic, fag in hand, gripping a grubby canvas bag on her shoulder. When she attended the 2017 Olivier Awards (and won) she wore a dress off the rack from Marks & Spenser.
Even with the Labour Left gaining power in the party, Jackson still refused to toe any party line. Her verdict on Jeremy Corbyn was typically doubled-edged:
I found him marvellous to work with, always cheerful, used to talk to everybody, wrote me a very sweet letter when I didn’t stand at the last election. I wrote back to him saying my only regret was that, as I was no longer a member of parliament, I could not nominate him for the leadership, which I would have done, because I was a firm believer that we always had to have a left-of-centre candidate.
Never in a million years would I have voted for him, though!
It is in her many contradictions that Glenda Jackson will never be replicated.
A girl of working-class roots from the Wirral with an innate knack for playing monarchs. A woman of commanding authority who carried herself without a modicum of pretension.
When a Guardian journalist commented on the ‘fear’ she instilled in others, Jackson didn’t immediately recognise the characterisation. Pressed further, she chalked it up to the directness typical of her upbringing: ‘Oh, I see, yeah! It’s the north versus the south. It’s what we do in the north!’
By never standing on ceremony, she stood up consistently for the values she was raised with.
How’s that for antithesis?
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