British actress Glenda Jackson, who won two Oscars before devoting herself to Labor Party politics, has died at the age of 87, her agent announced on Thursday (June 15th). She "passed away peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, after a brief illness alongside her family," said Lionel Larner, agent for the actress who won Hollywood awards for Ken Russell's Women in Love in 1970 and A Touch of Class by Melvin Frank in 1973.
She had just shot in The Great Escaper alongside Michael Caine, confirming her return to comedy after years devoted to politics. At 80 and after twenty-three years of absence, she was back on stage in 2016, playing King Lear. She won a Tony Award on Broadway two years later.
From Birkenhead, a small port opposite Liverpool, where she was born on May 9, 1936, she had kept a suburban accent and a desire to succeed. Daughter of a bricklayer and a housekeeper, she first worked as an employee in a pharmacy and took 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. The following year, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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 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.