RIP Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)
Glenda's love affair with acting began in her teens. Near Hoylake, in the North Country she comes from, there were three neighborhood cinemas, each showing two films a week. She hardly missed a one, and very quickly in her growing up, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford became her ideals.
They still are, and she longs to meet them. "They had incredible style and ability," she says. "They knew their medium and what they could do with it. They had a superb sort of arrogance. When they walked, they ground the poor beneath their heels." (When she was told of Glenda's devotion recently, Joan Crawford asked, "Who's Glenda Jackson?") Glenda remembers every film Joan Crawford made; and that she wore a different gown in every scene, no matter how humble the character she was playing. And, when her husband died, "the marvelous, tight-fitting black dress and widow's weeds she wore to the first board meeting of his company after the funeral."
For years, hunger was a commonplace in the lives of Roy and Glenda. They had five shillings (about 70 cents) between them when they were married 12 years ago. Their first flat was so inhospitable that they spent their nights in a "super four-poster," center stage in the London repertory theater where they were both working, and the bed was one of the props. An understanding carpenter would bring morning coffee when he awakened them. "It was the largest bedroom I ever slept in," says Roy.
It was the beginning of two years in which the only steady work either of them could get was waiting on tables, working in factories and pubs, selling in shops, where Glenda would steal little things like food or packages of razor blades that she could hide under her skirt. They don't apologize for this now. "It kept us alive," Roy says. "The terrible part about hunger" says Glenda, "is that you can never see when it will end."
Despite this hiatus in her career, Glenda has somehow managed to appear in about 200 productions, which could go far toward explaining why she is so skillful and adaptable as an actress. Often, when she was in repertory, she did a new play every week, seven shows plus morning and late-night rehearsals for next week. She would double as assistant stage manager, which meant sweeping out the theater at night, scrounging props and stage furniture, painting scenery.
Glenda was, she says, the first actress in London to go on stage completely nude. It was a play in which, incredibly, she was both Christine Keeler on her way to jail, and Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral of her husband. Christine's bathtub, overturned, became the President's coffin. The whole skit lasted only four minutes.
Since then she has been willing to act in the nude, "as long as the purpose is not spurious or sensational." Clothes, she feels, like stage sets, often only hamper and distract from the action. "You can't equate nudity and sex," she says. "Actually, the greatest intimacy between two people doesn't depend at all on whether they can lie together naked."
What does she regard, then, as a convincing way to evoke intimacy? "Maybe a couple cutting their toenails. No one ever does that in public." In any event, she is delighted that "the whole enormous hang-up about sex is well and truly smashed, and a much saner attitude is around."
SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY (1971)
honestly the human brain is so small that you *will* forget how much beauty there is out there to experience unless you leave your house every three days. ik its fucked up but i promise its true
just watched the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of Howards End (beautiful and heartbreaking etc.) and of course i find out there was a stupid fucking tv miniseries made out of it by checking the tumblr tag
Jack Lemmon on the set of ‘Some Like It Hot’ photographed by Phil Stern, 1959.
around this time last year i was passed out drunk on a portuguese beach and now i am none of those things. take me back!!
why is this person saying paul newman wasn't gay in movie cat on a hot tin roof... slander