Glenda Jackson returns to screen
NEW YORK — Only one project lured two-time Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson back to the screen after an absence of 25 years: “Elizabeth Is Missing.”
The film is a mystery but so much more — a powerful and moving look at dementia, a pressing emotional and financial issue for many nations with aging populations. Jackson plays a woman lost in the fog between the past and present.
“This is something that as a society, we have to look at seriously,” the actor told The Associated Press by phone from England. “It’s a big black hole.”
The 90-minute film aired in the UK in 2019 to great acclaim and American viewers get a chance to see it starting Sunday via Masterpiece on PBS.
Jackson, 84, plays the role of Maud, who is in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease. Her home is covered with taped-up reminders and instructions — “Don’t forget to lock up” and “No more bread” — and her pockets are stuffed with scrawled notes she wrote to remind herself of events and appointments.
The unique thing about it that isn’t often done in pieces about dementia is that it takes the viewer inside the experience of living with dementia — the fear, the panic, the frustration,” said Sarah Brown, an executive producer.
Viewers meet Maud just as she is insisting she find out what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, who seems to have vanished. This disappearance becomes linked in her increasingly chaotic mind with a much older one — of her sister in 1949. last week. Police said on Thursday that she’s still being sought on possible assault charges stemming from an altercation that’s prompted accusations of racial profiling.
The uproar began when Keyon Harrold, a prominent jazz trumpeter, posted a video on social media of the confrontation Saturday at the Arlo Hotel. He said the woman scratched him and tackled and grabbed his 14-year-old son, Keyon Harrold Jr., at the lower Manhattan hotel where the pair were staying.
Harrold said the phone was returned by an Uber driver shortly afterward.
The father’s widely watched video shows an agitated woman demanding her phone be returned while a hotel manager tries to settle the situation. At one point, the woman appears to rush forward and says, “I’m not letting him walk away with my phone.”
The new security video from police more clearly shows the woman frantically chasing down the teen as he tried to exit the hotel’s front door. She’s seen grabbing him from behind before both tumble to the ground.
The video was featured in a tweet by NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison that included a close-up photo of the woman labeled “WANTED.”