Glenda Jackson, Two-Time Oscar Winner, Dead at 87

By Allison Schonter

Glenda Jackson, a two-time Oscar-winning actor and former U.K. politician, has died. Jackson passed away at her home in Blackheath, London on the morning of Thursday, June 15 following a "brief illness," her agent, Lionel Larner, said in a statement, per The Guardian, adding that Jackson "died peacefully...with her family at her side." She was 87.
 
Born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1936, Jackson began her career as an entertainer when she joined an amateur theater group as a teenager. She went on to win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1963 when director Peter Brook drew attention with a season entitled Theatre of Cruelty. He cast her in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. Her screen career followed not long after, Jackson reprising her role as a prisoner assigned to play Marat's assassin on film in 1967, and within two years, her film career took off, Jackson becoming of the biggest British stars of the 1960s and '70s.
 
Her role as a headstrong artist in director Ken Russell's film Women in Love (1969) opposite Oliver Reed won Jackson her first Academy Award for Best Actress. She picked up her second just a few years later for the 1973 romantic comedy A Touch of Class, in which she played a fashion designer caught up in a catastrophic love affair with a US businessman. Jackson also received an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Her other notable credits include The Music Lover (1970) and Turtle Diary (1985). On TV, Jackson played Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC's serial Elizabeth R (1971), shaving her head for the role. The series, which aired on PBS in the U.S., won her two Primetime Emmy Awards for her performance.
 
Jackson retired from acting in 1991 in order to focus on her political career. After serving as an MP for the Labour Party in the U.K, she was appointed as a junior minister in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in 1997. She spent a total of 23 years as a Labour Party lawmaker. Paying tribute to her Thursday, Blair remembered Jackson as "a truly formidable woman who will be much missed," ABC News reported.
 
After leaving Parliament in 2015, Jackson returned to acting and starred as the title character in Shakespeare's King Lear, which opened at London's Old Vic in 2016 and later played on Broadway. She also appeared in the 2019 movie Elizabeth is Missing, which earned her a BAFTA award. Her agent shared that Jackson had recently completed filming The Great Escaper, in which she co-starred with 90-year-old Michael Caine. Caine remembered his co-star as "one of our greatest movie actresses. I shall miss her."

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