Glenda Jackson returns to hail Mary as forgotten Hollywood script revived
Veteran actress revisits Tudor tale for radio, adding she is never offered roles on screen these days
WHEN Glenda Jackson played Elizabeth I in Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971, she was at the peak of her screen career.
Nearly half a century later, she is revisiting the story – but this time on radio because, in her words: “I very rarely get offered anything that requires a camera”.
Jackson has been cast in the world premiere of the late Alexander Mackendrick’s Mary, Queen of Scots, a Hollywood screenplay that never was.
Mackendrick, director of Sweet Smell of Success and The Ladykillers, spent years trying and failing to get the project off the ground in the Fifties and Sixties. The script has now been adapted for Radio 4’s Unmade Movies series and will be heard next month for the first time, with Jackson as narrator and Ellie Bamber playing the lead.
“Radio is probably my favourite medium. The BBC is what I listen to most,” said Jackson, who won her first Oscar in 1971 for Women In Love with a second in 1974 for A Touch of Class.
“I very rarely get offered anything that requires a camera, be it television or film. The ones that do come my way are not very interesting.
“It is just extraordinary that still the majority of creative contemporary writers do not find women to be the central dramatic engine.”
Jackson said she is open to working with the likes of Netflix, although she has never used a streaming service herself. “I’d consider doing a big drama for anybody if it was good,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. At the suggestion she could follow in the footsteps of fellow Northerner Sir Ian McKellen and play a character in Coronation Street, Jackson said: “That’s quite a compliment, because I think actors in things like Coronation Street are marvellous.”
The life of Mary, Queen of Scots is a story she knows well, having played Elizabeth I to Vanessa Redgrave’s Mary in the 1971 film.
“Both of their lives, and the responsibilities that landed on their shoulders, were extraordinarily dramatic. But I think we tend to romanticise that period,” she said.
“If you actually look at the realities of life under the Tudors it was horrendous. We focus on the frocks, I think.”
Jackson played the Tudor monarch a second time in 1971 in Elizabeth R, the acclaimed BBC series. She laments the fact that the corporation could not make a drama of that scale now.
“It was all in-house. Sets were made out of yogurt pots and things like that. It was just amazing what they did. But all that has gone. There is no in-house creativity at the BBC, it’s all been siphoned off,” she said.
Jackson made her acting comeback in 2015 after 23 years as a Labour MP. She won plaudits for King Lear at the Old Vic and a Tony Award for Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women on Broadway.
In March, she will reprise her Lear in New York and, at 82, is undaunted by the gruelling nature of the role. When Sir Ian McKellen played Lear in the West End last year, he took a nap in his dressing room during the 45-minute period when the character is offstage.
“Good for him. I went out for a cigarette,” Jackson said of her own London run in the play.
“I remember when my father was ill once, he had retired and the doctor said, ‘The thing that makes people rust fastest is a comfortable chair.’ And I think that’s absolutely true.”
Unmade Movies: Alex Mackendrick’s Mary, Queen of Scots is on Saturday Dec 8 on Radio 4 at 2.30pm
‘I very rarely get offered anything that requires a camera, be it television or film. The ones that do come my way are not very interesting’