BOOKCASES in the house where she died yesterday were crammed with trophies any Hollywood star would envy.
Actress Glenda Jackson— who passed away at home in Blackheath, South East London, aged 87, after a short illness — won two Oscars, three Emmys, two Baftas and a Tony.
But remarkably she said the height of her acting career was appearing on telly with Morecambe and Wise.
When comics Eric and Ernie invited Glenda on to their hit TV show in 1971 she had already won her first Oscar, for 1969’s Women In Love, where she stripped off for sex scenes with Oliver Reed.
At that time, Glenda specialised in taking “serious” roles only.
Acting was not to be taken lightly — she even shaved off half her hair to play Queen Elizabeth I.
One critic said it would “take a long pair of tweezers” to find her sense of humour.
But Glenda happily dressed up as a sexy Queen Cleopatra for a Christmas special sketch with Eric and Ernie.
The moment Glenda announced, “All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got”, she proved the critics wrong.
In fact, she was so good in the play “what Ernie wrote” that film bosses saw she did have a funny bone.
They cast her in 1973 romantic comedy A Touch Of Class as British divorcee Vickie Alessio opposite Hollywood star George Segal.
When the film won Glenda her second Oscar, Eric Morecambe sent her a message: “Stick with us, kid, we’ll get you another one.”
She refused to collect either of her Oscars, but that did not stop her going on to play some of the greatest parts in film and TV and portraying Queen Elizabeth I a remarkable six times.
But at the height of her fame in 1992 she abandoned acting to become a Labour MP.
While she was in Parliament she was offered the role of M in James Bond.
But Glenda turned it down because she thought the part, which went to Judi Dench, was “boring”.
Apart from a short spell as a junior transport minister, she served her constituents in Hampstead and Kilburn, North London, from the backbenches until 2015, when she quit and returned to showbiz.
Four years later she won a Bafta for her moving portrayal of a woman with early-stage dementia in Elizabeth Is Missing.
Just weeks before she died, Glenda completed filming with Michael Caine in The Greatest Escaper, the story of 89-year-old veteran Bernard Jordan who absconded from his care home in East Sussex to attend D-Day commemorations in France.
Glenda May Jackson was born in 1936 at her grandmother’s house in Birkenhead, Liverpool, where builder dad Micky and mum Joan, a cleaner, all lived.
The oldest of four daughters, she was named after actress Glenda Farrell, who was in a film magazine the family were reading at the time.
Her middle name was after her maternal grandma, who the young girl spent most of her holidays with.
According to her mum, Glenda was always destined to be an actress.
Joan recalled: “When Glenda was nine she went down to Hoylake beach and fell into the pool.
“She knew I’d be vexed so she got her friends to carry her in like a tragedy queen.”
Glenda, who later in life smoked eight to ten cigarettes a day, got her distinctive gravelly voice from having to always shout growing up in a house with four girls.
Reading was her salvation and she once became so engrossed in a book that she forgot she had left her baby sister Lynne in a pram outside the library.
Glenda wanted to be a ballerina but grew too tall.
She had little interest in school and applied to be a librarian at the headquarters of Boots The Chemist.
Instead, the company gave her a job on the laxative and cough drop counter at her local Boots store.
Glenda said: “Cosmetics would have been better. But I thought there has to be something more interesting than working in Boots.”
To ease the boredom of her job, she joined a local amateur dramatic club.
Then a colleague at Boots helped her apply for a Cheshire council grant to attend Rada drama college in London, where, because of her plain looks, she was told, “Don’t expect regular work until you are 40”.
But by the time she was 33, Glenda had worked constantly on stage and in film.
Fierce critic
Her big break came in 1969 when controversial film director Ken Russell cast her in Women In Love.
Oliver Reed, who played one of her lovers in the film, tried to have Jackson removed from the project because she was apparently not pretty enough to make love to.
Glenda and Reed are said to have spent a total of 24 hours together naked on the set.
Reed later said that Glenda’s acting was so powerful it was “like being hit by a Bedford truck”.
At the time, she was married to actor-turned-antique dealer Roy Hodges and pregnant with their son, Dan, who is now a political commentator.
In another of Russell’s movies, 1971’s The Music Lovers, Glenda played the sex-starved wife of homosexual Russian composer Tchaikovsky, played by Richard Chamberlain.
In a rattling, rocking railway carriage, she strips off and attempts to seduce her horrified husband, as bottles, champagne glasses and a tin trunk crash down on her.
Glenda did not enjoy the glamour of showbiz. Acting was work to earn money.
She said: “I know what it’s like to be hungry.
“When Roy and I married we had five bob between us.”
Glenda did not enjoy the trappings of success either and even insisted Roy swapped an emerald ring he had bought her for plants for the garden instead.
In 1976, Roy filed for a divorce after Glenda had an affair with lighting director Andy Phillips, who she met while touring a play in Australia.
Glenda once said: “I don’t think I like men really.
“I always think it’s one heck of a lot of outlay for a very small return with most of them.”
She was a celebrity worldwide but hated being a star.
“It’s meaningless in the real world,” she said.
We will never see talent like what she has got again.
Keir Starmer’s tribute yesterday in the vein of one of Ernie Wise’s plays
She was awarded the CBE in the 1978 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to drama.
But she turned down a Damehood.
In the back of her mind she was constantly thinking: “I’m doing OK as an actress but what about as a human being.”
A Labour party member since 16, she suddenly turned her back on showbiz and stood as MP for the Tory seat of Hampstead and Highgate in 1992.
Although John Major was re-elected as Tory Prime Minister, she pipped Conservative Oliver Letwin, who later became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 2014-16, to take the seat.
When Labour came to power in 1997, Glenda became a junior transport minister for two years.
She returned to the backbenches and became a fierce critic of Tony Blair’s New Labour project, speaking out against the invasion of Iraq.
In 2005, she threatened to stand against Blair for the party leadership unless he announced his intention to stand down.
With boundary changes, she clung on to her seat in the 2010 General Election with a majority of only 42.
In April 2013, Parliament was recalled to pay tribute to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had just died.
Jackson caused shouts of “shame” when she attacked Lady Thatcher for inflicting “heinous social, economic and spiritual damage upon the country”.
The Speaker refused to rule her out of order.
Shouts of ‘shame’
One political commentator accused the Labour Left of being “petty”, “childish” and “self-indulgent” with their ungracious attacks on the Iron Lady’s memory.
That writer was Glenda’s own son, Dan Hodges.
He later wrote that he had never been prouder of his mother that day, who he called “a woman of conviction”.
Glenda decided not to defend her seat at the 2015 General Election and returned to acting, aged 79.
Last night, Labour leader Keir Starmer said: “Glenda Jackson was always fighting for human rights and social justice.
“We will never see talent like what she has got again.”