The British actor was the epitome of countercultural chic in key 1970s films. It is just a shame she couldn’t be persuaded to do more of them when her political career ended
For a brief, intense period in the 70s, Glenda Jackson was the very epitome of bohemian Brit chic in the movies: gamine in a worldly English way, intellectual, liberated and frank but with a capacity for demure naivety. This was a period that gloriously co-existed with her recurring appearances on The Morecambe and Wise Show. Jackson revered Eric and Ernie to the end of her life, because apart from their own value, her guest-spots on their programme led to her being cast in the 1973 Hollywood comedy A Touch of Class, which in turn gave Jackson her second Oscar, the title tacitly describing what this Rada-trained English actor was giving the movie. The first Oscar was for playing Gudrun in Lawrence’s Women in Love, a film which became part of her longstanding association with Ken Russell, a film-maker who respected her distinctive combination of seriousness, playfulness and sexiness.
Jackson had made an impression in the movies in the late 60s with Peter Brook’s film version of Marat/Sade as Charlotte Corday, the role she had played on the Broadway stage, and also in Peter Medak’s cult item Negatives, opposite Peter McEnery, as the couple who like to fantasise about being the murderer Dr Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve. But the Lawrentian drama Women in Love in 1969 took her aura of countercultural daring closer to the mainstream, in which she played the sensual Gudrun, entranced with Gerald Crich, played by that other seductive icon, Oliver Reed. Of course, all women in that film were bound to be upstaged by the sausage-party outrageousness of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked in front of the fire. But Jackson, in her angular poise and hungriness, was the film’s driving force.
