Two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson, who mixed acting with politics, dies at 87

Glenda Jackson won a Tony Award in 2018 for her role in Three Tall Women. (AP: Charles Sykes/Invision)

Glenda Jackson, a two-time Academy Award-winning performer who had a second career in politics as a British MP, has died at 87.

Jackson's agent Lionel Larner said she died on Thursday at her home in London after a short illness.

"She recently completed filming The Great Escaper in which she co-starred with Michael Caine," he said.

'An actor's life is not interesting'

One of four daughters of a bricklayer and a cleaning lady in north-west England, Jackson never forgot her roots even as she made her name as one of the greatest women actors of her generation.

Raw-boned, pallid and angular, with striking, sharp eyes, she had starred on stage, television and film before quitting to take up politics, declaring: "An actor's life is not interesting."

Growing up in Birkenhead, Cheshire, Jackson left school at the age of 15 and found work in a shop before winning a place at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

She won her first Academy Award in 1971 as lead actress for her role as a headstrong artist in director Ken Russell's film of DH Lawrence's novel Women in Love.

Glenda Jackson in Women in Love, 1969. Photograph: Everett/REX Shutterstock / The Guardian

Her second Oscar came three years later for A Touch of Class, a romantic comedy directed by Melvin Frank in which Jackson played a harried fashion designer caught up in a catastrophic love affair with an American businessman in London.

Jackson also won two Emmy awards for her portrayal of England's Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC's 1971 television series Elizabeth R.

After more than three decades on stage and film, Jackson quit acting and took her no-nonsense, straight-talking style into politics.

She had been angered by the damage she believed was inflicted on the working classes by Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Conservative prime minister from 1979 until 1990.

In 1992, at the age of 55, Jackson won a seat in parliament representing the left-of-centre Labour Party in a constituency in north London.

"We must work for the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the frail, the sick," she told supporters.

She returned to acting after leaving parliament and had some of her most acclaimed roles, including the title character in productions of Shakespeare's King Lear in London and on Broadway. 

She won a Tony Award in 2018 for her role in Three Tall Women.

Jackson was married from 1958 to 1976 to stage director Roy Hodges. She is survived by their son, Daniel Hodges, who was born in 1969.

AP/Reuters

Published at ABC News, June 15, 2023