Double Oscar-winning actress and Labour MP Glenda Jackson gives talk at Kilburn Film Festival

FROM the “wonderful treat” of working with Morecambe and Wise to the “farce” of Prime Minister’s Questions, Glenda Jackson opened a rare window into her two careers on Sunday.

The double Oscar-winning actress turned Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn was speaking at a question-and-answer session at the Tricycle in Kilburn following a screening of A Touch of Class, a film in which the famously testy Ms Jackson plays a character described as “about as tender and gentle as Attila the Hun”.

Ms Jackson, 75, won an Academy Award for her performance in the 1973 film but refused to acknowledge the prize before becoming MP in 1992. She said: “My mother used to keep them on the sideboard, and she polished everything within an inch of life. It didn’t take long for the surface gold plating to come off and show the base metal on the inside which, I thought, was a neat analogy. Awards don’t make you better – and, no, I didn’t pick them up.”

Ms Jackson recalled the quirks of legendary directors Ken Russell and Peter Brook, but it was working alongside comedy duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise that she remembered the best.

She said: “A consortium of the richest people in the world could not have put together the kind of programme they had under their skins. They also gave me one of the best acting notes I’ve had in my life.” It read “louder and faster”, she added.

Ms Jackson called for a festival to be set up in Ken Russell’s memory, add­ing: “It’s scandalous that no one remembers him any more. Outrageous.”

She said her most “groundbreaking” script was Sunday, Bloody Sunday, adding: “It was the first time homosexuality was presented as a love story as opposed to just a sex story.”

She added: “I never did much TV. I found working for a TV camera a pointless exercise. Those cameras would be just as happy shooting football as watch­ing what you are doing.”

Ms Jackson said rumours she had once caused director Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg to faint because she had spoken to him so sternly were “a slight exaggeration”. But like it or not, she has developed a reputation as a tongue-lasher.

She said: “I think that all stems from the most fundamental transformative work I’ve had, which was working in the theatre and working with Peter Brook. He told me the first thing was to leave the ego at the door. And so, it has always shocked me when I worked with people that were interested only in themselves. That had not been my work experience.”

On her conversion from actress to MP, she said: “Anything I could do to get rid of Margaret Thatcher and that ghastly, ghastly government that was legal, I was prepared to have a go at. I couldn’t bear what was happening to our country, the kind of people we were being expected to be. Everything I had been taught was a vice she was telling me was a virtue.”

Ms Jackson has noticed a crossover between theatre and politics.

“The best theatre is trying to tell the truth, that’s what the best dramatists are trying to do,” she said. “The best politicians are trying to tell the truth about how we do create a better, more equal society. 

“There are the big set pieces, but most of them are a complete waste of time. PMQs is a complete farce. But the emergency debate [on the News of the World hacking] was the most exciting thing we’ve had in 10 years. Suddenly everyone there had the bit between their teeth, lashing away.” Her work in the Commons, she added, had prevented her going to the theatre for the past 20 years. 

The Tricycle is facing massive funding cuts and its director, Nicholas Kent, told the New Journal last week the pressure had got too much for him and he would step down.

Ms Jackson said: “There is no point in writing to government and there will be no money from local authority. If you want to keep the theatre and cinema going you’ve got to come in and buy a ticket.”

Published: 14 July 2011
by TOM FOOT