GLENDA Jackson crammed a lot into every era of her life, both in the media spotlight and well away from it, but the late 1960s and early 1970s were a particularly productive period for the woman and her work.
The Birkenhead-born actress, who passed away last week at the age of 87, was everywhere at that time, gracing everything from art house epics to heavyweight dramas and Morecambe and Wise productions.
Supremely gifted, fiercely intelligent but never above a bit of slapstick fun with Eric and Ernie, she was always a unique proposition on stage and on screens big and small. For the purposes of this column, though, it's worth focussing solely on her cinema work from that period.
It was Jackson's appearance alongside Peter McEnery as one half of an odd Dr Crippen-obsessed couple in Peter Medak's equally odd Negatives in 1968 that brought her to the attention of director Ken Russell when he was plotting his adaptation of DH Lawrence's Women In Love the following year.
Her co-star in that production, Oliver Reed, famously compared acting alongside her to "being run over by a Bedford truck", but it's her dynamism and pure intensity that truly drives the film, despite the fact that it's Reed's naked grappling with Alan Bates that grabbed most of the headlines at the time and remains the image forever associated with the film.
The Academy clearly saw how important Jackson's role was, though, as her performance as Gudrun won her the first Oscar of her career. That she didn't pick it up in person and would hand that statuette and the second one she won, for A Touch Of Class in 1973, to her mother, who used them as bookends, tells you all you need to know about her lifelong disdain for the gaudier aspects of the showbiz world.
The relationship with Russell saw her play Tchaikovsky's sex-obsessed wife in The Music Lovers (1971), and while she was offered the lead role in the director's notorious adaptation of The Devils, she preferred to take a small uncredited cameo in his musical The Boyfriend the same year.
Also in 1971, an unbelievably productive year for Jackson, she played an austere Queen in the BBC production Elizabeth R and gave one of her all-time best performances as the frustrated divorcee Alex Greville in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday. Few could walk the line between tough and vulnerable on screen quite like Glenda Jackson.
Other fine roles were peppered throughout that purple patch, including the aforementioned A Touch Of Class, where the talent for old fashioned screwball comedy she'd honed on British TV screens with Eric and Ernie earned her a Hollywood audience, and further Oscar nominations confirmed her status as a true screen legend.
That she would later firmly cast aside that status for a career in politics perfectly encapsulates the steely determination behind that unforgettable face. Smart, committed and able to tackle anything that was thrown at her, from light to dark and all shades in between, she was true one-off on screen and in life.
