Lioness in Winter

Glenda Jackson returns to Broadway after 30 years, in Three Tall Women. At 81, she can still level a room with one glance

- Mary Kaye Schilling

After 23 years as a member of the british Parliament, Glenda Jackson returned to acting as only she would, ferociously, as King Lear in an acclaimed 2016 production at London’s Old Vic. That she vanquished Shakespeare’s mad king without any particular fuss made over the part being played by a woman was unsurprising to a Jackson completist. Consider her first starring film role, in Ken Russell’s Women in Love, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s psychosexual novel. What got the most attention when the film debuted was a homoerotic nude wrestling match between its male stars, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. Watching it now, that moment seems quaint, as does the film. Jackson’s Oscar-winning performance, as Gudrun Brangwen, Lawrence’s man-killer, on the other hand, remains singularly fierce and brazen. She looks like no movie star before her, and not many after.

Reed, a lusciously handsome Michelangelo statue come to life, famously fought Jackson’s casting as his lover, saying she wasn’t physically desirable enough. He was the movie’s putative star, but it’s Jackson—with her splotchy skin and sharply angled features—that you can’t take your eyes off. “Flat as a pancake, no makeup, lank, unattractive hair,” a female friend said of her in a 1970 Look magazine profile. “But an actress like Glenda makes you believe she’s beautiful.”

Interviews throughout her career invariably make much ado about her disinterest in the trappings of female stardom: a bare-faced, sensible-shoe aesthetic that endures. For a recent New York Times portrait—heralding her return to Broadway after three decades, in a revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women—she posed in a Tintin sweatshirt. (Somewhere, Frances McDormand was high-fiving.)