Glenda May Jackson was born on May 9, 1936, at 151 Market Street in Birkenhead, Cheshire, the daughter of Harry, a builder, and Joan, née Pearce, who worked in a local shop, pulled pints at a pub, and cleaned houses. Her mother named her after the Hollywood film star Glenda Farrell. Shortly after her birth, the family relocated to Hoylake, also on the Wirral Peninsula, where they lived in a modest two-up two-down house at 21 Lake Place, with an outdoor toilet. The eldest of four daughters, Jackson was educated at Holy Trinity Church of England primary school and Cathcart Street primary school before attending West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls in nearby West Kirby. In her teens she performed with the Townswomen's Guild drama group, and in 1952 she made her first acting appearance in J. B. Priestley's Mystery of Greenfingers for the YMCA Players in Hoylake.
After two years working at Boots the Chemists, Jackson won a scholarship in 1954 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, moving to the capital in early 1955. In January 1957, she made her professional stage debut in Ted Willis's Doctor in the House at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing, followed by Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables while still at RADA. She began working in repertory theatre and also took on stage management work in Crewe. From 1958 to 1961 she went through a period of intermittent work, part of the grinding early career that most actors of her generation endured before any recognition arrived.
The breakthrough came through her association with director Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1960s. She made her Broadway theatre debut in the landmark production of Marat/Sade in 1966, for which she would receive a Tony Award nomination. By the end of that decade, her work on film had begun to attract the kind of attention that would define the next phase of her career. Her performance in Ken Russell's Women in Love, released in 1969, brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress — an award she did not collect in person due to work commitments. She repeated the feat with A Touch of Class in 1973, becoming one of the few actors to win the Best Actress Oscar twice, and again was absent from the ceremony. The discipline she brought to the awards was characteristic of an approach to the craft that always privileged the work over the ceremony surrounding it.
Her range across the decade was remarkable. The BBC series Elizabeth R, broadcast in 1971, featured Jackson in a career-defining portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I that earned her two Primetime Emmy Awards. The same year she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday. In Mary, Queen of Scots, also released in 1971, she played Elizabeth opposite Vanessa Redgrave's Mary. Hedda followed in 1975 and The Incredible Sarah in 1976, along with more commercial fare including House Calls and Hopscotch. On the stage she continued to accumulate nominations for the Laurence Olivier Award, receiving five in total: for Stevie in 1977, Antony and Cleopatra in 1979, Rose in 1980, Strange Interlude in 1984, and the extraordinary King Lear in 2016. Her Broadway work also brought Tony nominations for Marat/Sade in 1966, Rose in 1981, Strange Interlude in 1985, and Macbeth in 1988.
In 1992, Jackson made one of the most unusual pivots in the history of the performing arts. She stood for election as a Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate, representing the Labour Party, and won. She would go on to serve continuously for twenty-three years, first for Hampstead and Highgate from 1992 to 2010, and then, following boundary changes, for Hampstead and Kilburn from 2010 to 2015. She served as a junior transport minister from 1997 to 1999 during Tony Blair's first government, though she later became a vocal critic of Blair's policies. The 2010 general election produced a moment of extraordinary political drama when Jackson retained her Hampstead and Kilburn seat by a majority of just 42 votes — confirmed only after a recount — the narrowest margin of victory in Great Britain that election cycle.
She stood down at the 2015 general election and, at the age of seventy-nine, returned to acting with a fierceness that silenced anyone who might have expected a gentle curtain call. Her King Lear for the Old Vic in 2016 was greeted with near-universal acclaim and represented a long-anticipated return to the stage after a twenty-five-year absence from acting. She reprised the role on Broadway in 2019. That same year she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance in the revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, completing the rare and coveted Triple Crown of Acting — two Oscars, two Emmys, and a Tony. Also in 2019 she received both the BAFTA Award and the International Emmy Award for her work in Elizabeth Is Missing. In 2018 she had been given the Irish Film and Television Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Jackson was awarded a Golden Globe Award and received nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Tony Awards in addition to her wins. The Irish Times placed her seventeenth on its list of Ireland's greatest film actors in 2020, a curious testament to the cross-cultural reach of a woman who was, to the bone, from Birkenhead. She died on June 15, 2023. The arc of her life — from the outside toilet at 21 Lake Place to two Oscars, Parliament, and Broadway's brightest stage — remained one of the most improbable and compelling stories in the history of either art or politics.
