In what would prove to be her final film role, actress Glenda Jackson has died at the age of eighty-seven. The two-time Oscar-winning actress, who also served as a Labour MP in the British government, passed away just weeks after finishing filming her role in a film alongside actor Sir Michael Caine. Jackson died in the peace of her home in Blackheath, London, after she suffered from a “brief illness,” according to her agent.
Although Jackson had a very successful film career, she took a break from acting beginning in 1992 to serve in Parliament, which she did for more than twenty years. Prior to her unexpected death, Jackson starred in the upcoming movie The Great Escaper, which also starred the elderly Sir Michael Caine, 90. Caine played octogenarian Bernard Jordan, who managed to escape from his nursing home in 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in France during World War II when the British and Americans worked together to fight Adolf Hitler.
Jackson stepped down from her role as an MP in Parliament in 2015. Instead of going quietly into the night, she decided to return to her acting roots and pursued a TV role in the 2019 production Elizabeth Is Missing. In that production, Jackson played an elderly woman suffering from the early stages of dementia.
When news of Glenda Jackson’s death was announced by her agent, people from the world of acting and the world of politics flooded social media with tributes. Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer wrote that Jackson’s sudden passing “leaves a space in our cultural and political life that can never be filled.”
Following her production of Elizabeth Is Missing, Jackson starred in the critically acclaimed and Tony-winning performance on Broadway called Three Tall Women. The New York Times applauded Jackson’s performance as “a casting coup … She is, politically and personally, the embodiment of not going gentle into that good night.”
One year later, when she was eighty-two, she returned to the stage in New York City for a production of King Lear, in which she played the lead in a gender-bending role. Her performance was deemed “exhilarating” by The Guardian.
During her acting career, Jackson won two academy awards. The first was for her role in the 1970 romantic drama Women In Love. For that film, she appeared alongside Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. Her second Academy award came for her role in the 1973 British romantic comedy A Touch Of Class.
In her final fifteen years of life, Jackson lived in a basement apartment beneath the home of her son, Dan Hodges, who works as a columnist for Mail on Sunday. She had Dan with her husband, Roy Hodges. Hodges and Jackson married in 1958 after the pair met during their shared time working at the Butlin’s holiday camps. After several years of marriage, the couple divorced in 1976.
Announcing her death, agent Lionel Larner said: “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress, and politician, died peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, this morning after a brief illness with her family at her side. She recently completed filming The Great Escaper, in which she co-starred with Michael Caine.”