Two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson gave up a career in acting at the height of her success to run for political office, and in 1992 became a UK Member of Parliament representing the north London constituencies of Hampstead and Highgate for the Labour Party. She serves them even now in the same capacity (despite her unsucessful 1999 bid to become their mayor -- she did have to give up the post she'd held for two years, junior minister of rail transport, in order to run).
Born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, to Joan (a charwoman) and Harry (a bricklayer) Jackson, Glenda was
… More one of four daughters. The family moved to Harry's home town of Hoylake when Glenda was only a year old. She attended the West Kirby County grammar school, where she claims to have been "the archetypal spotty teenager who suffered the tortures of the damned because I wasn't like those girls in the magazines. I had lank, greasy hair and I was fat and spotty." She found herself underemployed as, among other things, a shop clerk and a switchboard operator before being admitted, at age 18, to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA, 1955-57; she remains an Associate Member). She recalls, ""I used to empty ashtrays for the cigarette butts, re-roll them and make myself a [cigarette] I used to live on a pound of sausages and a cooking apple."
Jackson made her stage debut in 1957 in Separate Tables at Worthing, England, and her London stage debut the same year in All Kinds of Men. She made her debut into married life the next year, having fallen in love with Roy Hodges, the stage manager of the Crewe Repertory Theatre, where she was performing at the time. Her film debut came in 1963 with a role as a party-scene extra in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life. That same year she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and by 1965 had risen from bit parts to featured roles, having been discovered by Peter Brook, cast in as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade and sent off to Broadway; she reprised the role in the 1967 film.
In 1969 she found herself performing unclad in Women in Love while five months pregnant with her son, Daniel Hodges. She remarks, "I'd never had such a marvellous bosom." She divided her time between film and stage, with much success in both, until her successful bid for Parliament.
The United States began honoring Jackson in 1965 by awarding her the Variety Award for Most Promising Actress for Marat/Sade. She earned two Best Actress Oscars (for Women in Love, 1969, and A Touch of Class, 1973), as well as an additional two Best Actress Oscar nominations: in 1971 for Sunday Bloody Sunday and in 1975 for Hedda). The New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Actress were all hers not once but twice: in 1970 for Women in and in 1981 for Stevie. She also received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for 1971's A Touch of Class, two Emmy Awards in 1972 for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Series and Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, both for her work in Elizabeth R (the latter was for a single episode, entitled "Shadow in the Sun"), and four Best Supporting or Best Featured Actress Tony nominations (no wins) for Marat/Sade, 1966, Rose; 1961; Strange Interlude, 1985, and Macbeth, 1988.
Jackson has not, however, gone unrecognized in her own country, where Sunday Bloody Sunday earned her the 1971 British Film Academy Award for Best Actress. She won the the 1984 London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre Award) for Best Actress for Strange Interlude, as well as two CableACE Awards for Best Actress, for two separate episodes of The South Bank Show: "Sakharov" in 1985 and "The Secret Life of Arnold Bax" in 1994. As if that were not enough, she was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1978. No wonder she was greeted in the House of Commons by an MP who said, depressing Jackson, "What d'you want to come here for? You're famous already."
Jackson and Roy Hodges divorced in 1976, despite her 1976-1991 companionship with lighting director Andy Phillips she has not remarried. Son Daniel's politics (and courage) apparently agree with his mother's: in 1992 he defended to black men from white tormentors in a south London pub and for his efforts had a broken beer glass shoved into his face; the incident lost him an eye.
She had not returned to acting, declaring “... you can’t be a part-time MP any more than you can be a part-time actress!” In August 2006 she wrote an article for The Guardian explaining her fervent opposition to her government's inflexible approach to battling terrorism. She continues to fight for bans against fox hunting and smoking (although apparently she smokes or has smoked, herself), for equal rights for gays, against the introduction of ID cards to the general [UK] population, and against the war in Iraq.
