British actress Glenda Jackson, who won two Oscars before entering Labor politics, has died at the age of 87, her agent announced Thursday. “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress and politician, passed away peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, after a brief illness alongside her family,” said Lionel Larner. “She had recently finished filming The Great Escaper with Michael Caine,” he added.
Ken Russel’s muse, she won her first Oscar in 1970 for Love, an adaptation of D.H Lawrence’s daring novel about the passionate relationship between two sisters and their lovers. In 1973, it was with the comedy A mistress in the arms, a woman on the back that she won her second statuette thanks to her composition of a divorced woman trapped 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 his Ophelia in Hamlet.
After thirty-five years of career in theater and cinema, she entered 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 Minister of Transport in the government of Tony Blair from 1997 to 1999, she became a fierce opponent after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.