There once was a British Labour Party politician named Glenda Jackson. She represented a London district in the House of Commons from 1992 to 2015, identifying strongly as a socialist, a feminist, and a republican (that is, a non-monarchist), serving for two years as a junior minister for transport, often criticizing Prime Minister Tony Blair from the left, and, on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, accusing the Iron Lady in a widely quoted (and, in the Commons, heavily booed) speech of responsibility for a wide range of social disasters. “The first prime minister of female gender, ok,” said Jackson about Thatcher. “But a woman? Not on my terms.”
Such ugly remarks aside, Jackson, who died last Thursday at the age of 87, does seem, on the whole, to have conducted herself, during her political career, with honor and decency — at least when judged by the usual political standards. Although she voted in 2016 to keep Britain in the EU, Jackson, to her credit, honored the results of the Brexit vote and praised Prime Minister Theresa May for “trying to deliver the referendum result to the people of our country.”
Before she became an MP, as it happens, Jackson was an actress. I hadn’t realized how much theatrical experience she had. Born in 1936, she spent much of the 1950s appearing in a range of plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Rattigan, and others, mostly in regional British theaters; in the 1960s she was a star of the London and New York stage, cast in the title role of Phedra at the Old Vic, essaying Lady Macbeth on Broadway, playing Nina Leeds (the protagonist of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude) on both sides of the Atlantic, and taking Hedda Gabler on a world tour.
And in the 1970s she was one of the world’s biggest movie stars, receiving Best Actress Oscars for Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973) while also earning glowing notices for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Incredible Sarah (1976), and Stevie (1978). Among her later stage appearances that sound as if they’d have been terrific to experience are her turns as Martha in a 1989 Los Angeles production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and as Christina Mannon in a 1991 Glasgow staging of Mourning Becomes Electra.
But when I heard that Glenda Jackson had died, I didn’t think about her politics, her movie roles, or her stage work. Instead, my mind rushed back to my mid-teens, when, having just been overwhelmed by the magnificent 1970 BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, I was equally bowled over by the equally wonderful 1971 BBC series Elizabeth R. Since I lived at the time in New York City, where the episodes of these series — six apiece — were aired repeatedly on several local public-television stations, I was able to watch each episode dozens of times. It was a nearly unique situation in the era before home video recording and videotape rentals, and it enabled me to pay close attention to the many superb details of these productions, not least the colorful particulars of Jackson’s bravura performance.
Thirty-five years old when Elizabeth R was first broadcast, Jackson convincingly played Elizabeth I from the age of about twenty until her death at age 69. Over the course of the series, we hear other personages discussing Elizabeth’s extraordinary personal qualities, and not once does the character created by Jackson seem undeserving of their praise in any regard. We meet her in the first episode as a young princess of high spirits and deep suspicions who, having learned from hard experience never to trust anyone fully, has a quick mind, a keen understanding of the subtleties of law and power and loyalty, and a fine-honed skill at judging other people’s motives. When she’s at risk of being executed by her sister, Mary I, for refusing to accept the kingdom’s return to Roman Catholicism, she’s brilliant at feigning a sudden desire to be instructed in the “True Faith.”
In later episodes, after Elizabeth has ascended to the throne, Jackson makes her thoroughly believable as a mature woman of great wit and human insight who’s the intellectual equal, at least, of every one of the distinguished members of her council. We’re told more than once that the English people, divided by religion, are bound together only by their love for her, and that she’s motivated in everything, above all, by her love for them — and Jackson creates a queen who makes both of these statements entirely credible. She captures Elizabeth’s contradictions — among them her ability to flirt with a foreign prince and be girlishly flattered by his praise without losing her appropriate cynicism, as a monarch, about foreign entanglements, her profoundly personal discomfort with “country matters,” or her fear, as a woman in what was then a man’s job, of losing her independence and sovereign power (and potentially, as her mother, Anne Boleyn, did, her head).
The Elizabeth of Elizabeth R, developed over nine hours during which (in contrast to many current Netflix offerings) barely a moment is wasted, is one of the richest characters in any English-language dramatic work, play or film or television series, of the last half-century. Determined to be strong and tough without being ruthless like her father, Henry VIII, and her sister, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth exhibits, by turns, pity, anger, fear, tenderness, fearsome authority, a respect for individual conscience, and an authentic desire to be virtuous and tolerant — a truly loving monarch — within the limits that her era made possible. She struggled to maintain a government less brutal than her father’s or sister’s before her, and made herself a founder of the modern world by stating and acting out, as far as she could, her disinclination, as she put it, to “make windows into men’s souls.”
One can’t help asking what actress other than Jackson could, at the time, have pulled off this role. Long before she came along, Bette Davis, whom I revere, played Elizabeth I in two films, in a time when the acting styles were different, so that her performance can now seem rather, well, hammy; years after Jackson, Cate Blanchett, another actress I admire, played Elizabeth, also in two films, and I watched each of them more than once, although I must admit to having very little memory of them. Then there’s Jean Simmons, who in Young Bess (1953), which I saw a dozen or more times during my teenage years, did a beautiful job of bringing to life Elizabeth the princess who survived her brother’s and sister’s reigns as well as the machinations of Sir Thomas Seymour and others. But Simmons never got a chance to play Elizabeth throughout her reign.
Given the remarkable empathy that Glenda Jackson brought to the role of Elizabeth I — a female leader in a man’s world, and one who enhanced British power and British freedoms — one question comes quickly to mind: namely, how could an actress who captured such a personage so majestically have had so little appreciation for Margaret Thatcher? Jackson said that Thatcher was not a woman on her terms. Was Elizabeth I?
Reflecting on her time at Westminster in 2018, Jackson said: “I enjoyed the constituency responsibilities. I was extremely fortunate. But I must be honest, I don’t miss Parliament itself. I mean, I saw egos going up and down those corridors that would not be tolerated for 30 seconds in a professional theater.” Which doesn’t mean that she lacked an ego. In his obituary of Jackson for the New York Times, Benedict Nightingale wrote: “Ms. Jackson was regarded as aloof and egoistic, and she could be contemptuous of actors she found lacking in commitment, bellicose in rehearsal rooms and unafraid of challenging eminent directors. Gary Oldman…called her ‘a nightmare.’”
After her departure from politics, Jackson returned to acting. As recently as 2018, she won a Tony for her performance in the Albee play Three Tall Women. In 2016 and 2019, to rave reviews, she played King Lear — yes, King Lear — in London and New York respectively. I was impressed to read in her Daily Mail obituary that she had spent her last 15 years living “in a basement flat beneath the home of her son, Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges.” It was also nice to learn from Nightingale that she hated “Hollywood glitz.” Jackson, said Chris Bryant, a fellow MP and author of her biography, “reeked of not caring about things like fame, hierarchy or authority. What she believed in was work. Hard work. Work that got things done. Work that cleaned up messes…. Makeup and posh frocks were only any use as part of a costume.”
The quote goes on to include more unnecessary nastiness about Thatcher. But let’s just leave it at that, and sum up by saying this: at times impatient with colleagues who lacked her selfless commitment, Glenda Jackson, apparently, was fiercely devoted to her profession, had a no-nonsense belief in hard work, lived very humbly for so prominent an individual, and believed strongly in being of selfless service to her country. Not, allow me to point out, unlike a certain Prime Minister who shall remain nameless.