Two people who watched the actor and Labour politician closely remember her desire to get to the truth that made her so powerful on stage, screen and in parliament
I thought I had seen Glenda Jackson at the peak of her career: in 2016, when she played King Lear. She, on the other hand, declared her acting “apotheosis” to be her appearance on The Morecambe & Wise Show. She had left the stage to become an MP in 1992, so her triumphant return at the age of 80 was my only chance of writing about her. It was a mighty occasion: I just wish I had seen more.
I had watched her on film, gleaming in Sunday Bloody Sunday, and on the telly, withered and chalk-faced as Elizabeth I. I would love to have seen her playing Eliza Doolittle in 1956, and, nine years later, as Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade; she considered Brook to be Britain’s greatest theatre director. I wish I had seen her firing pistols in Hedda Gabler in 1975, and, in 1989, heard her rail in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
