M SHE RULES!
Two-time Oscar winner and former British politician Glenda Jackson wows in ‘Three Tall Women’
OVIEGOERS of a certain age may remember the ’70s as the Glenda Jackson era, when it seemed she starred in every British film that came out. Among the most memorable: “The Music Lovers,” in which her rapacious Russian countess fails to bed Richard Chamberlain’s gay Tchaikovsky. “They needed a shot of me rolling naked on the floor of the train,” Jackson tells The Post of Ken Russell’s 1971 film. “Some champagne glasses fell on me, and Ken said, ‘Come on, clean her up, she’s not bleeding much!’” Then a piece of luggage fell off an overhead rack, knocking over a crew member.
“The next thing I know,” she says, “the cameraman is lying in my lap saying, ‘I’m a ma-ma-married man! I’m a ma-ma-married man!’ ” The memory makes her smile. Briefly. After 30 years — 23 of them as a member of Parliament — Jackson’s back on Broadway in “Three Tall Women,” giving a towering performance with a stamina that awes her co-stars.
“She could do three of our shows in a row and not be knocked over,” Laurie Metcalf says of Jackson, who’ll turn 82 in May. “She’s a working actor who’s always the first one at the theater, who doesn’t expect any frills.”
Over tea, Jackson waves away a scone, awaiting questions. For starters: To prepare for their roles as three stages of Edward Albee’s “woman,” did she, Metcalf and Alison Pill do any bonding exercises? She stares back, then replies, “It’s called acting.”
She’s won two Oscars and countless other honors for doing it. In all her roles — from Queen Elizabeth I to Walter Matthau’s love (“House Calls”) — she always radiates a prickly intelligence. Long politically active, when duty called, she answered.
“My country was being destroyed,” she says of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “When I heard her say there was no such thing as a society, I was so furious, I walked into my French door and nearly broke my nose!”
And so, when the Labour Party approached her in 1990 about a Parliament seat, Jackson went door to door, seeking support. She recalls one man who answered her knock, a snarling dog at his feet. “The guy was wearing shorts and a bandana and that was it,” she recalls. After she introduced herself, he said, “Miss Jackson, I’m to the right of Genghis Khan, but come in and have a cup of tea.” She graciously declined, recognizing a lost cause when she saw one.
Of course, her career had prepared her for rejection: “I’d spend weeks preparing [for an audition], only to hear, ‘Oh, thank you, darling, but we’re looking for a blonde.’ It’s not personal, but you feel it.”
She won her seat in 1992, agitating, among other things, for stronger laws against domestic abuse. In all that time, didn’t she miss performing?
“Acting only exists when you’re doing it,” she says. “If you’re not doing it, there’s nothing to miss.” She says there are no particular parts she longs to play. “I’ve always waited to see what came through the door,” says Jackson, who, a year after leaving Parliament in 2015, played King Lear in London, to global acclaim.
She says a theatergoer stopped her outside the John Golden Theatre, where “Three Tall Women” opened Thursday, to say he’d flown in from Taiwan to see her in “Lear” and now this.
She shakes her head. “I just hope he thinks it’s worth it,” she says.