Actress and politician Glenda Jackson has died at 87.
Jackson’s agent Lionel Larner told the Associated Press that the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” star died Thursday at her home in London after a short illness. He said she had recently completed filming “The Great Escaper,” in which she starred alongside Michael Caine.
The actress, a two-time Academy Award-winning performer, had a second career in politics as a British lawmaker that lasted more than two decades before she returned to acting later in life for a successful stint featuring some of her most acclaimed roles, including the title character in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and a Tony Award for her performance in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.”
Jackson was one of the biggest British stars of the 1960s and ’70s, and won two Academy Awards for “Women in Love” in 1970 and “A Touch of Class” in 1973.
Born in 1936, Jackson grew up in a working class family in the Cheshire region of England. Her father worked in construction, carrying bricks, and later a minesweeper during the war, and her mother as a cleaned homes and worked at the pub, according to The New York Times. When she was 16, Jackson began a career in pharmacy and was accepted to Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at age 18, before kicking off her acting career, according to IMDb.
One of her first jobs in the world of acting was “half acting, half stage-managing and full-time sweeping the floor,” she told The New York Times.
Jackson was married to Roy Hodges from 1958 through 1976. The pair shared one son, Daniel Pearce Jackson Hodges, who is 54.
She went into politics, winning an election to Parliament in 1992. She spent 23 years as a Labour Party lawmaker, serving as a minister for transport in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first government in 1997.
During her time in Parliament, she didn’t see a single play, she told The New York Times.
Jackson came to be at odds with Blair over the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She said Blair’s decision to enter the U.S.-led war without United Nations’ authorization left her “deeply, deeply ashamed.”
“The victims will be as they always are, women, children, the elderly,” she told The Associated Press before the invasion.
Jackson returned to acting after leaving Parliament in 2015.
Contributing: The Associated Press
