Two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson, dies at 87
London, The Gulf Observer: 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.
Born into a working-class family 1936 in Birkhenhead, northwest England, Jackson trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company — where she starred in the cutting-edge drama “Marat/Sade” directed by Peter Brook — and became one of the biggest British stars of the 1960s and 70s, winning two Academy Awards, for “Women in Love” in 1971 and “A Touch of Class” in 1974.
On television, she 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 one-liner, “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. 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.
She 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.”
