Glenda Jackson, a two-time Academy Award-winning performer who had a second career in politics as a British lawmaker before an acclaimed late-life return to stage and screen, has died at age 87. Jackson's agent Lionel Larner said she died Thursday at her home in London after a short illness. He said she had recently completed filming The Great Escaper, in which she co-starred with 90-year-old Michael Caine, the AP reports. Caine said Jackson was "one of our greatest movie actresses. I shall miss her."
Born into a working-class family in Birkhenhead, England, in 1936, Jackson trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, starring in the cutting-edge drama Marat/Sade. She became one of the biggest British stars of the 1960s and '70s, winning two Academy Awards, for the brooding DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love in 1971 and the sophisticated romcom A Touch of Class in 1974. On television, Jackson took home two Emmy Awards in 1972 for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth R and secured a place in British pop culture history by playing Cleopatra in a classic sketch on the Morecambe & Wise Show in 1971. "All men are fools," she proclaimed in what became a famous line, "and what makes them so is seeing beauty like what I have got."
In her 50s Jackson went into politics, winning election to Parliament in 1992. A lifelong socialist, she spent 23 years as a Labor Party lawmaker, serving as a minister for transport in Prime Minister Tony Blair's first government in 1997. She came to be at odds with Blair over the 2003 invasion of Iraq and said his decision to enter the US-led war without UN authorization left her "deeply, deeply ashamed." On Thursday, Blair called her "a truly formidable woman who will be much missed." Jackson returned to acting after leaving Parliament in 2015 and had some of her most acclaimed roles, including the title character in Shakespeare's King Lear. She had her first film role in a quarter-century in the 2019 movie Elizabeth is Missing, winning a BAFTA award for her performance as a woman with Alzheimer's trying to solve a mystery. Labor Party leader Keir Starmer said Jackson's death "leaves a space in our cultural and political life that can never be filled."
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