Glenda Jackson returns to screen with ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’
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 Maude 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.
The film has interwoven timelines and Maud seamlessly switches between her 1949 past and present, revealing a sympathetic and unsentimental portrait of dementia.
“Nobody listens to me. Am I invisible or something?” says Maude. Later she melts down at a restaurant: “I want to scream but it won’t come out!”
Jackson, who picked up Academy Awards for 1971’s “Women In Love” and 1974’s “A Touch of Class,” swapped film and TV for politics in 1992 when she became a Labour Member of Parliament.
She used to visit senior centers — they’re called care homes in Britain — as part of the job and saw firsthand the effects of the disease.