Timeless film8/19/2023 ![]() ![]() It was in A Touch of Class, opposite George Segal – another actor destined to be associated with this Hollywood era – that Jackson became a mainstream Hollywood star, winning her second Oscar, and for all that this was a tame commercial picture compared to her earlier work, it did give her the screen time and the presence that she really hadn’t had yet, and she got to show that she could headline a film and do romantic comedy with the very best of them. In Ken Russell’s hallucinatory The Music Lovers, she was the endlessly lustful and errant Nina, wife of Richard Chamberlain’s Tchaikovsky. As in Women In Love, it was arguably the men who got to do the transgressing, but again Jackson supplied the sophistication and the sang-froid. And there was also her participation in the bisexual menage a trois, very shocking in its day, in Sunday Bloody Sunday, as the woman having an affair with a younger man (Murray Head), who is in turn involved with Peter Finch’s doctor the latter had a much-commented-upon (but closed-mouth) onscreen kiss. ![]() She embodied glacial hauteur and loneliness as Elizabeth I in Mary, Queen of Scots, and played the same role, effectively simultaneously, in Elizabeth R on BBC Television – a performance which made possible Cate Blanchett’s performance in the role years later. In 1971, Jackson was in three major films and a BBC TV drama: in Ken Russell’s The Boyfriend she had a cameo as the star furious at the success of her stand-in, played by Twiggy (whose own faintly androgynous image was a distant cousin to Jackson’s). Photograph: Cinetext/United Artists/Allstar ![]() The film’s driving force… with Oliver Reed, Alan Bates, Jennie Linden and Eleanor Bron in Women in Love. But Jackson, in her angular poise and hungriness, was the film’s driving force. Of course, all women in that film were bound to be upstaged by the sausage-party outrageousness of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked in front of the fire. But the Lawrentian drama Women in Love in 1969 took her aura of countercultural daring closer to the mainstream, in which she played the sensual Gudrun, entranced with Gerald Crich, played by that other seductive icon, Oliver Reed. Jackson had made an impression in the movies in the late 60s with Peter Brook’s film version of Marat/Sade as Charlotte Corday, the role she had played on the Broadway stage, and also in Peter Medak’s cult item Negatives, opposite Peter McEnery, as the couple who like to fantasise about being the murderer Dr Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve. The first Oscar was for playing Gudrun in Lawrence’s Women in Love, a film which became part of her longstanding association with Ken Russell, a film-maker who respected her distinctive combination of seriousness, playfulness and sexiness. Jackson revered Eric and Ernie to the end of her life, because apart from their own value, her guest-spots on their programme led to her being cast in the 1973 Hollywood comedy A Touch of Class, which in turn gave Jackson her second Oscar, the title tacitly describing what this Rada-trained English actor was giving the movie. This was a period that gloriously co-existed with her recurring appearances on The Morecambe and Wise Show. For a brief, intense period in the 70s, Glenda Jackson was the very epitome of bohemian Brit chic in the movies: gamine in a worldly English way, intellectual, liberated and frank but with a capacity for demure naivety. ![]()
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