British actress Glenda Jackson, who won two Oscars, has died at the age of 87, her agent, Lionel Larner, announced on Thursday June 15. “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress and politician, passed away peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, surrounded by her family, after a brief illness,” he said. “She had recently completed filming The Great Escaper in which she co-stars with Michael Caine,” Mr. Larner added.

Glenda Jackson is one of the crowned actresses in Hollywood. She was Oscar-winning for Love (Women in Love, Ken Russell, 1970). In 1973, it was with the comedy A mistress in the arms, a woman on the back (A touch of Class, Melvin Frank, 1973), that she won her second statuette thanks to her composition of a divorced woman taken at trap in an impossible love with a married man.

Born on May 9, 1936 in Birkenhead, a small port opposite Liverpool (north-west England), this daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaning lady first worked as an employee in a pharmacy and followed drama lessons for amateurs. Despite the lack of family support, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and went on tour. This is how director Peter Brook spotted her and hired her in 1963 to play Ophelia in Hamlet.

“I rule my life, I believe it, I hope so”

After thirty-five years of career in theater and cinema, she went into politics to fight Margaret Thatcher, whom she accused of destroying British society. Elected in 1992 as a Labor MP for the London suburbs, she kept her constituency until 2015 and distinguished herself by her particular attention to the “poor, the unemployed and the sick”. Appointed as transport minister in Tony Blair’s government from 1997 to 1999, she became a fierce opponent after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 1973, drama critic Colette Godard wrote in the columns of Le Monde, Glenda Jackson “is tall, with a direct gaze, a calm voice, a wide smile. More than beautiful, she is feminine, that is to say passionate, lucid, intelligent, without anything cutesy or fragile. Certainly, she knows what she doesn’t want, and also what she wants, which is rarer and has earned her the reputation of being a difficult actress. She says she only has bad relationships with bad directors. Glenda Jackson, reported Colette Godard, said of herself, “I run my life, I believe it, I hope it.” But she entered into a well-defined pattern the day I decided to be an actress. »