Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Glenda Jackson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British actress Glenda Jackson.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Glenda Jackson

Glenda May Jackson is an English actress and politician. She has won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice: for her role as Gudrun Brangwen in the romantic drama Women in Love (1970); and again for her role as Vickie Allessio in the romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973). She received praise for her performances as Alex Greville in the drama film Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Elizabeth I in the BBC television serial Elizabeth R (1971), winning two Primetime Emmy Awards for the latter. In 2018, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in a revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, becoming one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting" in the US.

I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better.
My money goes to my agent, then to my accountant and from him to the tax man.
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
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.
When I have to cry, I think about my love life. When I have to laugh, I think about my love life.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
I told them I wouldn't sign a blank cheque.
I have never believed you make your case stronger by bad-mouthing your opposition.
It would be nice if education was free to everyone who wanted it, but that's not the world we live in.
If I'm too strong for some people, that's their problem.
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
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.
I've always been ambitious to be very good at what I do.
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.
I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.
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.
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.
No, I didn't think of myself as an idealist. I consider myself as a believer in what I regard as the Labour Party's basic principles, which have to do with equality and 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. You know, the golden rules.
You've got to sing like you don't need the money.
Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.
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.
The best theater is trying to tell the truth, and the best politics is trying to tell the truth.
One hell of an outlay for a very small return, with most of them.
No, I'm not recognized in London. What would people recognize?
Why put make-up on when you only have to take it off again?
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.
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.
I turn my feet in when I'm sitting down. I tend to put my arms across me when I'm sat thinking; I bend forwards. Loads of protective curves.
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.
I've always said the first duty of life is to live it, and I do believe that. And we delude ourselves if we think it's not going to end. How we individually meet that, I think, is entirely individual.
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.
Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.
I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious.
My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.
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.
Men can be a great deal of work for very little reward.
Rock Hudson. He was an absolute human being. Charming, funny, real. — © Glenda Jackson
Rock Hudson. He was an absolute human being. Charming, funny, real.
As I've had occasion to say before, I'm a pretty anti-sociable Socialist.
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.
I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.
a really good play is ambiguous - which is exactly why it endures. Every succeeding generation develops theories about it. The play's words provide very little clue. On the contrary, words are notoriously imprecise and open to every kind of interpretation, so you must search.
If I'm too strong for some people that's their problem.
comedy ... is much harder to do than drama. It's not true that laugh and the world laughs with you. It's very hard to make a group of people laugh at the same thing; much easier to make them cry at the same thing. ... That's why great comic acting is probably the greatest acting there is.
Ive always been ambitious to be very good at what I do.
Being an actress has something in common with being a housewife. They both look terribly easy to someone who hasn't done them. And the easier it looks, probably the better you are doing your job.
If we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from.
If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.
it is extraordinary how much you are theirs, and how little they are yours. The child grows inside you and there is something mystical and mythical in that, but then you actually see that you are nothing more than the box in which they come. There is this total person, already formed, themselves.
You'd think is something one would grow out of. But you grow into it. The more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good.
people only ever offer you a great deal of money for rubbish. The greater the number of noughts on the cheque, the greater the crapular content of the movie; the better the work, the less you're paid.
For marriage the best man is the man within oneself. Most women need to develop their own 'masculine' qualities of independence, pride, courage and open sexuality. — © Glenda Jackson
For marriage the best man is the man within oneself. Most women need to develop their own 'masculine' qualities of independence, pride, courage and open sexuality.
The Treorchy Male Choir - the very name is a song! May I thank the Choir, past and present, for all the glorious music-making they have shared with us.
To have something which one particularly wants to do is more important than anything else. It is even more important than succeeding in that thing you want to do. In fact it does not matter if you fail, but it does matter that you do or do not want to do something.
The good writer and the good actor are always searching for what is essential. It is a never-ending task because what is essential is always elusive and, therefore, fascinating.
It's appalling that there have to be movements organized to give human beings the right to be human beings in the eyes of other human beings.
I can't actually see myself putting make-up on my face at the age of sixty, but I can see myself going on a camel train to Samarkand.
I have been disappointed many times, but never defeated.
Nobody really needs a mink coat... Except the mink.
The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.
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