Glenda Jackson Learns New Role--Politician

Glenda Jackson, the Academy Award-winning actress and socialist, is within reach of a dream: abandoning the stage for politics.

Jackson still has her choice of stage and screen roles, but she’s also a liberal who has chosen to tie her future to the Labor Party, the socialist opposition.

If elected, she faces the comparative obscurity of being a backbencher, a rank-and-file lawmaker in the 650-member House of Commons. That means late-night sittings and looking after a constituency, which can entail everything from fighting road expansions in the district to unsnarling hitches in the supply of hot meals to the elderly.

It also raises the fascinating prospect of that distinctively low, richly textured Jackson voice doing verbal battle with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at twice-weekly Question Time.

After doing a Los Angeles production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” this spring, Jackson won the Labor Party nomination for Hampstead and Highgate, home turf of London’s smart literary and theatrical set.

Thatcher’s troubled Conservatives hold the district by a narrow 2,200-vote margin, making it a prime Labor target at the next general election. The election must be held by mid-1992 but could come sooner.

In British politics, a candidate for Parliament must go before the party constituency branch and explain why he or she would be a good candidate.

Jackson was up against three finalists, and she says her ultimate triumph was to write her own script. “I mean, you don’t win an Oscar; someone else wins it for you,” she said in an interview. “But this, I did.”

The actress won her first Oscar for “Women in Love” in 1970, followed by another for “A Touch of Class” in 1973.

But for her political career, she chooses to look almost determinedly unglamorous, making no attempt to hide her 53 years. She is spurred by a hatred for Thatcherism.

“I hope she’s hanging herself with her own hubris,” she said. “I am genuinely appalled by the state of my country and the plight of many thousands of people under a government that seems to govern only for the top people.”