Glenda Jackson’s Brilliant Career

After 23 years as a member of the British Parliament, Glenda Jackson returned to acting as only she would: ferociously, as King Lear in an acclaimed 2016 production at London’s Old Vic. That she vanquished Shakespeare’s mad king without any particular fuss made over the part being played by a woman was unsurprising to a Jackson completist. Consider her first film-starring role, in Ken Russell’s Women in Love, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s psychosexual novel. What got the most attention when the film debuted was the homoerotic nude wrestling match between its male stars, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. Watching it now, that moment seems quaint, as does the film. Jackson’s Oscar-winning performance, as Gudrun Brangwen, Lawrence’s man-killer, on the other hand, remains singularly fierce and brazen. She looks like no movie star before her, and not many after.

Reed, a lusciously handsome Michelangelo statue come to life, famously fought Jackson’s casting as his lover, saying she wasn’t physically desirable enough. He was magazine profile. “But an actress like Glenda makes you believe she’s beautiful.”