Glenda Jackson Quotes

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Glenda Jackson

Profession : Actress

Birth : May 9, 1936

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

Glenda Jackson

I studiously avoid any academic dissections of the play and any kind of previous experience of playing. For me, it's all in the play.

Glenda Jackson

My mother kept all my awards on the sideboard of her front room, and she polished them. She polished everything religiously. And it doesn't take long for the very thin layer of gold to disappear and the base metal underneath to show through.

Glenda Jackson

It always amazed me - it still does - that people offer me work. And when the theater was my basic bread and butter, every time a show finished, I was convinced I would never work again.

Glenda Jackson

Usually, if there is a woman's part in a piece, there's only one, so you've got no other actresses to work with.

Glenda Jackson

My fear with 'Lear' was that I would not have the physical or vocal strength. But this play, it's all in your head. That was one of the really interesting things when we were rehearsing it: We were all exhausted because it was all up here.

Glenda Jackson

If a woman is successful, then she's deemed to be the exception that proves the rule. If a woman fails, well, we're all failures. That kind of underlying approach to our gender doesn't seem to me to have changed an iota.

Glenda Jackson

I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don't find women interesting. Women are rarely, if ever, the central dramatic engine; they're there as an adjunct, and that hasn't changed at all.

Glenda Jackson

Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher's government out I was prepared to do. I could not believe what she was doing to this country.

Glenda Jackson

My life was transformed by the Labour government of 1945. It was transformative for millions of people like me, you know - education, the health service. It was proof that politics can make life better for people; that a social dream can become a social reality by the power of government.

Glenda Jackson

As I've had occasion to say before, I'm a pretty anti-sociable Socialist.

Glenda Jackson

You don't do a play to compete for an award. This was the argument I always had over the Oscars. I didn't win them. They were given to me. All I did was 2 films. People always say the analogy is Olympic gold medals.

Glenda Jackson

The best teacher is an audience. The ideal performance is when that group of strangers sitting in the dark gets energy from the group in the light and sends energy back to us. When it really works, a perfect circle is formed.

Glenda Jackson

Rock Hudson. He was an absolute human being. Charming, funny, real.

Glenda Jackson

What interested me, 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.

Glenda Jackson

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.

Glenda Jackson

No, I'm not recognized in London. What would people recognize?

Glenda Jackson

I was blessed by my parents and my antecedents by a very strong work ethic. I mean, being a Member of Parliament is 24/7, just as much as when you're actually doing a play. It's not quite 24/7, but it's the work that counts.

Glenda Jackson

When I was feeding myself by being a professional actress, I never got a good notice in the 'Evening Standard.' And when I changed direction and became a Labour MP, I was the wrong political party for the 'Evening Standard.'

Glenda Jackson