How Glenda Jackson Changed Hollywood’s View of Women in Love
Guy Lodge Film Critic “She’s 100% a professional, and this is a great night for professionals,” said the actor Juliet Mills as she accepted Glenda Jackson’s first Best Actress Oscar on the absent winner’s behalf at the 1970 Academy Awards. On the face of it, it sounds an oddly impersonal thing to say in the circumstances — almost as if Mills knew nothing of Jackson, and opted for the vaguest praise possible. (In fact, it was probably a veiled dig at that year’s Best Actor winner, George C. Scott, who had rather more acrimoniously declined to attend the awards.) It proved, however, a rather apt way for Jackson, then 34, to be welcomed into Hollywood’s inner circle. A proudly working-class Brit who didn’t look or act (on screen or off) like the blushing English roses typically imported from across the pond, Jackson had markedly more interest in being a professional actor than in being a movie star. That spared her, even as she racked up assignments and awards, much of the fuss and frippery associated with A-list status — going to the Oscars included. (She was a no-show each of the four years she was nominated, but did turn up once to present Best Actor. A pro indeed.) And when, in middle age, she tired of acting altogether, she quit as unassumingly as she arrived — instead entering British politics with a sense of liberal-minded duty uncommon in the ranks of celebrities-turned-statesmen.