Remembering Glenda Jackson

Here’s a short piece I’ve written for the Telegraph about the actress Glenda Jackson. She was born ion 9 May 1936 and died on 15 June 2023. She was remarkable.

I loved Glenda Jackson.  We became MPs on the same day in 1992.  Because neither of had been a career politician – she was an Oscar-winning star of stage and screen and I was a daytime TV presenter – we were both outsiders when we arrived at the House of Commons and we formed an unlikely friendship.  We supported different political parties, but as newbies at Westminster we became allies in adversity.   

I don’t think Glenda much enjoyed her early days in parliament.  She reckoned some of her Labour colleagues did not take her seriously because she was an actress, and, because of her star status, in the evenings, waiting for votes, she was often on her own.  Her own people did not come and chat to her (she could appear a bit forbidding) and the Whips from each of our parties seemed suspicious when she and I were seen having a drink together.  Glenda did not like the tribalism of Westminster.  She thought it quite absurd that the Labour MPs and the Conservative MPs sat in separate parts of the tea room and never shared tables in the Members’ Dining Room.  She hated the yah-boo politics of Question Time in the chamber.  ‘It’s utterly inane,’ she said.

Of course, I had admired her since the 1960s when, as a teenager, I had seen everything she did with Peter Brook and Peter Hall with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych Theatre in London.  Along with my parents (and the rest of the country) I was mesmerised by her portrayal of Elizabeth I on television in 1971 and, in my twenties, I was fascinated by the way she managed to be simultaneously intelligent, hard and sexy on screen and by her range, at times alarming, at times alluring.  She won Oscars for both Women in Love and A Touch of Class.

I began to get to know her properly in 1984 when I invited her to a party I organised at the Old Vic in honour of Sir John Gielgud’s eightieth birthday.  She came with a single rose to give to the great man and stood in the stalls watching him on the stage with complete adoration in her eyes.  Ten years later, on the day Sir John turned ninety, Glenda and I and my wife gave him lunch at the House of Commons.   It was on that occasion, when we told Sir John how honoured we were that he, the great classical actor of the twentieth century, should choose to have lunch with us on such a special day, famously replied: ‘Oh, my dears, I’m delighted.  You see, all my real friends are dead.’

At lunch, Sir John was delighted by Glenda and flattered by her interest in his career and the respect she showed for him.  He felt they had much in common, as classical stage actors who had somehow managed to make a success of it in Hollywood and on TV.  He had adored seeing her playing Cleopatra with Morecambe and Wise.  At her request he talked about his own Hamlet, and, mentioning how both Sarah Bernhardt and Judith Anderson had played the role, suggested to Glenda that she would make ‘a fine Hamlet’.  She protested that she was far too old.  ‘Then one day, Lear perhaps?’ he suggested.

In 2016, after twenty-three years away from the stage, she did play Lear and she was extraordinary.  When we were MPs, I often told her she was wasting her time and her talent in parliament, but she believed what she was doing was worthwhile.  And important.  When she stood to be London Mayor, I told her she should smile more and she said she’d try.  I said to her, ‘You’re a lot more fun than people think you are.’  She replied, ‘No I’m not.’   I recall having tea with her at the ASLEF headquarters in Hampstead during the 2001 general election campaign.  We laughed a lot.  On the right day, she was ready to send herself up.  It was raining, so she had called off the afternoon’s canvassed.  ‘I’m not daft,’ she said.

She was far from daft.  She was a wonderful actress and a committed constituency MP; she was an Oscar, Tony and Emmy award-winning international star and a conscientious government minister.  She did what she wanted to do in her life and did it all to the best of her ability. 

I imagine she regarded me as well- meaning lightweight whose company she was happy to keep because of our shared passion for Shakespeare, Sir John Gielgud and politics.  I regarded her as a most unusual and very special human being.   I loved her for her great talent, her decency and her seriousness.