Splendid Glenda

SPOTLIGHT

Her face is instantly recognizable, her talent unquestioned, yet she herself remains elusive, indefinable, uncategorizable: the actress's actress, the star who eschews stardom. Glenda Jackson's rise to dramatic heights has been inexorable—drugstore clerk at sixteen, smalltown-repertory actress at twenty-two, the Royal Shakespeare Company at twenty-eight, Oscars and Emmys in her thirties. Now, at forty-eight, apparently with the world at her feet, has come not the confidence of the superstar but mounting fears of inadequacy. "I'm frightened, I mean really frightened, every time I go onstage now. The only lesson you ever learn is how very difficult it is to act well and how very easy it is to act badly.'' Avoiding commercialism and hype, she now plays only roles that challenge her and that bring her to the vitalizing brink of terror. Portraying the neurotic, introspective Nina in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude in London and New York, she holds the stage for almost five hours, speaking both conversation and inner thoughts. Such a dramatic tour de force, longer than Gone with the Wind, often exhausts her, but it is the fear of failure that keeps her going. Perversely, her avoidance of the social world has brought her a special mystique and an American public hungry for more. She finds Broadway audiences uniquely stimulating because "you know very quickly what their response is; they let you know immediately." Yet she always looks forward to returning home to London to her sixteen-year-old son, her garden, her Jane Austen novels, and that respected anonymity impossible almost anywhere else for the elusive, reluctant superstar.

Andrew Stephen