Former MP Glenda Jackson Is Returning To Acting

Glenda Jackson, the Oscar-winning actress who turned to a career in politics in the early 90s, is making a return to her first love.

Jackson, who will be 80 next year, quietly stood down as an MP for Hampstead and Kilburn following this year’s General Election.

And now she’s making tentative steps back into the thespian world, firstly by appearing as the narrator in a serialisation of stories by the writer Emile Zola for Radio 4.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she said that she’d never missed acting while pursuing her career in politics, but found the return to it ‘daunting and exciting’.

“Acting only exists only when you’re doing it, so if you’re not doing it there’s nothing to miss,” she explained.

The RADA-trained star of movies like Ken Russell’s 'The Rainbow’ and Trevor Nunn’s 'Hedda’, she won two Oscars for Best Actress, one for her role in 'Women In Love’ in 1970 and another for 'A Touch of Class’ in 1973.

As such, she puts herself among just 13 actresses to have won the Best Actress Oscar more than once, including the likes of Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman and Katherine Hepburn.

She then retired from acting at the peak of her career in 1992, taking to politics because of Margaret Thatcher.

“I could not stand what was happening in my country,” she added. “The destruction of what I had regarded as the social basis of my country.

“Anything I could have done that was legal that would have removed Thatcherism from governing my country I was prepared to do.”

Rather brilliantly, of her two Oscars, she said: “One of my nephews asked if he could borrow one a few years ago because they were doing a project at school - I don’t think he’s ever given it back - and the other one is up in the attic.

“I just did the job I was asked to do.”

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Image credits: Yahoo File/Rex Features