Glenda Jackson Quitting Parlament to Return to the Stage

Glenda Jackson on Quitting Parliament, Playing Lear and Returning to Broadway

After winning two Oscars, she stopped acting for decades to fight Thatcherism. Now, at 81, she’s tackling an Edward Albee classic. But she insists, “I lead a very dull life.”

By BEN BRANTLEY FEB. 20, 2018

“I’m a pretty antisocial Socialist.”

As you might suspect, Ms. Jackson’s approach to acting appears to be unclouded by mysticism or sentimentality. She sees performing as a collaborative effort, above all. (“I was taught to leave my ego outside the stage door,” she said to me several times.) In discussing “Lear,” she kept insisting that the play is not only about its title monarch. “There’s not a bad part in it.”

The fact that she was a woman playing a man turned out to be a nonissue. “What interested me,” she said, “was that as we age, those seemingly unbreakable barriers that define us, our gender, they begin to crack, to blur; they’re not absolutes anymore.”

As for how she shapes her character, “it’s all in the text,” she said. She does little if any research on a part beyond reading the script again and again and again. When she showed up for the first day of rehearsals of “Lear,” she had already memorized her lines.

Appearing before a live audience again, she says she felt no more nervous than she had before any performance from decades earlier — which is to say, she was terrified. “You can go onto that stage every night, and it’s always the equivalent of going onto the topmost diving board, and you don’t know if there’s any water in the pool.
Photo
Glenda Jackson in the title role of “King Lear,” with Rhys Ifans as the Fool, at the Old Vic in London. Credit Rex Features, via Associated Press

“Every time I say, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ I think, ‘My God I don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it.’ We are sadomasochists as well as being brave, actors, and we torment ourselves.”

“I hate traveling,” she said, sounding almost nervous, for once. “I hate luggage.”