My disastrous tea with Glenda Jackson
NEW YORK - Be careful what you wish for. Tea with Glenda Jackson, an actress I've admired since watching "A Touch of Class" on TV with my mother as a teenager, turned out not to be the dream encounter this fan imagined.
The 81-year-old English actress, making a triumphant return to Broadway in Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," seemed friendly enough when we exchanged greetings at an Upper East Side cafe. But she went into battle mode once the tape recorder was switched on.
Jackson's clipped replies and occasional pounding of the table with her hands made me wonder if this Labour Party stalwart had mistaken me for the Conservative opposition. Her default position of peremptory bewilderment - "I have no idea what you're asking me" - was perplexing.
My questions about her reemergence on stage after her long break from acting to serve as a member of Parliament seemed to me fairly straightforward and innocuous. I had come to worship Jackson, not to grill her. I left expertly filleted by that trademark voice she still wields like a scalpel.
Time has reinterpreted Jackson's stern beauty so that her face now resembles a Francis Bacon portrait of itself. The lines on her face are etched with a deliberateness that matches her unyielding disposition. Her eyes, not quite blue, not quite brown, have a watery quality, as
