Articles/Interviews

'Out with those varicose veins, Glenda, dear!' The flamboyant Ken Russell is accustomed to his stars bowing without question to his often outrageous demands, even iron-willed damsels like Glenda Jackson, and so cosmetic surgery was promptly arranged for his new leading lady. The controversial, middle-aged English director had already acquired an enfant terrible reputation by stunning, delighting and upsetting British television viewers with a series of fictionalised film biographies of famous composers. Now, with Billion Dollar Brain starring Michael Caine behind him, he was about to embark on a movie which would transform a great many other people's lives. And he wanted Glenda.

'When she walked into the room', said Russell of their first meeting, 'I found myself watching her varicose veins more than her face. Our film was set in the 1920s, with a lot of ankle - and a good deal more - in evidence. Glenda, fortunately, was not one to let a few veins stand between her and stardom, and so out they came.'

And international stardom, as predicted, came swiftly to Glenda with Russell's 1969 screen rendering of D. H. Lawrence's celebrated and controversial novel Women in Love, about the battle of the sexes and relationships among the elite of Britain's industrial Midlands in the 1920s. By casting her as the domineering, emasculating sculptress Gudrun Brangwen - who, amongst other things, liked to dance with bulls - Russell was accorded an Academy Award nomination for his efforts and Glenda won the Oscar itself.

'How could a beautiful, feminine girl like you emasculate a tough, rugged character like me?' Oliver Reed asked her, not a little tongue-in-cheek, when filming started. But he soon discovered that his character, Gerald Rich, the decadent homosexual son of a wealthy colliery owner, is reduced to a state of suicidal depression by the guile and wiles of the formidable, mean-lipped but sexually-curious Gudrun, whom Lawrence is said to have modelled upon the writer Katherine Mansfield. Their relationship becomes a strange mixture of brutality and love, ranging from one to the other until she finally destroys him.

There are many stories about the actual working relationship of Glenda and Reed, some of them no doubt apocryphal. At the end of the shoot, the burly, bull-necked actor-nephew of film director Sir Carol Reed, who for a while specialised in sullen, scowling, often vicious roles, would go around announcing, I'm articulate on the subjects of horses, dogs, cats, actors, pissoirs - but not Glenda. And remember: I wasn't in her picture; she was in mine.'

Their first meeting was at Russell's house, where the cast (including Alan Bates and Glenda's screen sister, Jennie Linden) had assembled for a preliminary script reading. Before Glenda's arrival, Russell informed Reed, 'You're going to work with an actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company.' Reed, the erstwhile school drop-out, Soho nightclub bouncer, boxer, cab driver and former film extra who, with no formal drama training, much less theatrical experience, had become one of Britain's highest-paid movie stars, looked half suspiciously at the corpulent director and, in exaggeratedly 'cultured' tones, replied sarcastically, 'Oh, jolly good.'

Glenda then entered the room, and Reed inclined his head towards her and looked aghast: 'Suddenly this woman sat on a chair on the other side of the room, and this rather plain truck started to make the air move. So I just mumbled my lines, because I had no identity towards Glenda. I didn't know her from Eve; never heard of her. I'd heard of Shakespeare, but not this truck sitting across the room from me. Unlike her, I wasn't associated with art: I made commercial films. I love motor cars, and you can judge a car by its pitch; and suddenly I'd met a truck, no less, and when its engine started to rev I began to realise that it had a different pitch to what I'd expected. Glenda was like a Ford truck with a highly-tuned V8 engine in it. If an engine is properly tuned, it doesn't care about the road. So, more than making the air move, she began to eat up the road very quickly, because she didn't care about the hypocrisy of the old structure of the cinema, the star system and the casting couch. Glenda didn't take that route. She came straight from the dust of the theatre, and she began to growl.'

'And suddenly the truck met somebody like me. I swear to God, I admired her for what she was, but I wouldn't budge one inch when it came to putting my masculinity on the line; and it came to it once, this confrontation, when Glenda said she wanted to dominate me sexually. Russell and I were trying to convince her that I should rape her and be the dominant factor in that particular love scene. She was so aggressive about it, saying no, she should dominate me. In the end we had to call in the producers, because this unknown girl was being so headstrong. It made me wonder whether she'd read the book, because she thought she had to rape me, had to completely dominate me, had to climb on top of me and become the aggressor. But she wasn't experienced enough to know that to be on top is not the be-all and end-all of the conquest. I don't think she would have compromised had she not believed that there was still enough superstition left in male vanity to warrant the leading man, and the director, to think that she Glenda Jackson should be underneath getting fucked for the things that she said.'

Vladek Sheybal has a quite different view of the 'headstrong' actress. He played the homosexual German sculptor, Loerke, who exerts a disturbing emotional influence on Glenda and Reed in the sequences filmed at the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt. In the trio's first scene together, Reed took exception to Glenda's particular interpretation. 'Oliver was expressing dislike of what she was doing', said Sheybal, 'but she was completely immune to his heated behaviour and simply disregarded it. I thought, "Poor Ollie!", because he really was jumping up and down with rage, ranting, "This shouldn't be played like that, you know." She just sat quietly, almost immobile, and either looked out of the window at the snow and the Matterhorn, or smiled at me; but she refused to react to Ollie's behaviour, refused to reply to anything he said.'

Why would she choose not to defend herself? 'Because she was still very much the vulnerable girl', said Sheybal. 'Choosing not to react was her particular defence mechanism. When we first met, after her struggling rep days at Perth, she also sat like that and hardly looked at me. No, not to look somebody in the eyes, not to respond to somebody, was Glenda's ultimate weapon in self-protection.'

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Soon after Women in Love was released, a rumour circulated that Oliver Reed tried to have Glenda replaced on the grounds that it would be impossible for him to make love to her. Whether or not it was true it was obvious to the crew that the mutual respect between Glenda and Reed was so powerful that, paradoxically, it sometimes bordered on manic antipathy. Each recognised the other's strengths and weaknesses, and they manoeuvred around each other like two powerful motor-boats forced to compete in a narrow, dangerous waterway. Her relationship with Russell was no less ambivalent. When the filming was completed he refused to discuss her, saying enigmatically, 'I'd better not talk. I might say something both she and I would regret.' Glenda called him 'an utter physical coward', because, she said, he always made his actors do extremely dangerous things so that he would not look a coward himself. 'Yes, he's a bloody coward', agreed Reed, 'and he makes everybody live out the performances that he has in his mind. Ken's a voyeur, of course; but that's his strength. Some like to watch, some like to do it; and there are moments, I suppose, given the freedom, when some like to do a little bit of both, or a lot of both. But that's me being honest; Ken merely shrouds it in Art. Glenda understands that and says, "Fuck it!", and off come the clothes and - voila!'

Both Reed and Russell used the same phrase about her: 'Glenda is no fool.' She was shrewder, and more self-protective, than most people realised. Vladek Sheybal, unknown to Reed, had had first-hand experience of Glenda's guile. It had occurred in the fantasy scene in the Swiss chalet where, in Loerke's bedroom, Glenda and Sheybal dress up as the passionate Cleopatra and the homosexual Tchaikovsky, a game which ends by their spending the night together. 'The whole scene had been suggested by me to Ken Russell, and Glenda was following it', said Sheybal. 'But when I saw the rushes a few days later I was astounded to discover that Glenda had some close-ups that I couldn't remember being filmed - a lot of reaction shots to my lines, fantastic reactions. I said to Ken, "I don't remember making those", and Ken said, "Well, darling, she rang me in the middle of the night and said, 'Vladek did that scene so brilliantly, and I don't have the counterpoint. Could you ...?', and so I accommodated her wishes." She was defending herself as an actress. She wanted to have equal play with me. She was always on the ball.'

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The cancellation of the Bronston pageant enabled Glenda to devote her unexpectedly free time to a low-budget British film, The Triple Echo (1972), based on a novel by the English pastoral writer H. E. Bates. Shot entirely on location in Wiltshire and Dorset, and completed in six weeks, it became a project very dear to Glenda's heart - to the extent that both she and co-star Oliver Reed, together again for the first time since Women in Love, agreed to accept 'short' money plus a percentage of the profits. Alas, there were to be no profits. Set in the remote English countryside during the Second World War, it tells of Glenda's passion for Brian Deacon, a young deserter, and her determination not to hand him over to the military authorities who beleaguer her isolated farm. She resorts to disguising the boy as her sister. This subterfuge is successful at first but leads to bizarre consequences as they slowly discover their sexual roles beginning to change and the emergence of new erotic fantasies. The advent of a bull-like sergeant, Oliver Reed, who is completely deceived by the boy's disguise and attempts to seduce both 'sisters', brings about the film's savage climax.

Reed, in fact, very nearly bolted from the project, because the seduction of Glenda and a man seemed to be at odds with his macho image. 'In the script it said I had to kiss the soldier while feeling his bollocks, and I said no', Reed recalled. 'So they said Glenda Jackson was in the film, and I still refused to do it. I said, "Do I have a love affair with Glenda?" and they said, "No, she has a love affair with another fellow - but the fellow is dressed up as a girl." So I said I'd do it if I didn't have to kiss the fellow; and so we made it.'

During the making of the film Glenda and Reed received a lot of bad press about their off-screen relationship, which was put across as being about as cosy as a pair of angry grizzly bears. 'Working with Glenda', said Reed, 'is rather like being run over by a Bedford truck.' While describing their feuding as 'a myth', Glenda then intimated quite a different picture: 'We're neither the other's favourite sort of person. I mean, I certainly don't hate him ... I neither like nor dislike Oliver on a personal level.' But visitors to the set noticed that Glenda, with a scarf over her 1940s wig and gum boots on her feet, invariably sat alone on a rickety canvas chair between takes, almost cold-shouldered by the other actors and totally ignored by Reed. Actress Judy Loe found her 'very straightforward, very business-like.'

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While it was true that Glenda had managed to arouse many of her male co-stars, it was usually their temper that had exploded rather than their sexuality. But there have been some exceptions; Oliver Reed continued to find her 'a very sexy bird', and, under certain circumstances, so did actor Patrick Stewart.

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But there was no smell of suntanned bodies when she returned to England in October and went straight into location shooting in London's East End for her next film, The Class of Miss MacMichael (1978), with Oliver Reed and black American actress Rosalind Cash. Written and produced by Judd Bernard, who had produced Negatives a decade earlier, the low-budget, tight-schedule, pitch-black comedy did little to enhance anybody's reputation, despite the fact that it was a film which Glenda had wanted to make for eight years. In it she played a dedicated, if unorthodox, schoolmistress who battles gamely against her slum surroundings, her delinquent pupils and her tyrannical headmaster (Oliver Reed in his third movie with Glenda). The result, shot in a disused (and now demolished) Victorian school in Bethnal Green, was a thorough, misguided mess, more resembling an updated version of the St Trinian's films of the 1950s than The Blackboard Jungle or the cosmetic To Sir, With Love.

Glenda, in the title role, came in for a great deal of stick from the critics, one of whom accused her of being 'neither sufficiently gullible nor sufficiently likeable for the part.' The consolation prize came when the Variety Club of Great Britain awarded her the trophy for the Best Film Actress of the Year; and not just for one movie, but for three: House Calls, Stevie and The Class of Miss MacMichael . . . more silver for mother to clean.

Oliver Reed, years later, was still angry about the conditions under which the film was made. 'They cheap-skated it', he thundered. 'Even in the most complicated scenes there was no time for rehearsals. It was just "turn on the lights and fucking shoot it".' How did Glenda get on with the pupils? 'I don't know. I just saw her working, and I then went to my room and she went to hers. We didn't socialise, ever. She certainly never went to the film unit's communal lunches; but on the set she kept slapping everybody on the back, saying, "We're making an art film." Otherwise she kept herself to herself.'

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Oliver Reed, who always saw Glenda as few others saw her, spoke for millions when he concluded, 'When all the great ladies of the theatre are dancing round the maypole upstairs with their petticoats showing, Glenda will be resoundingly applauded by the great pundits of the theatre. Once there's a spark there's always a fire, depending on where the wind blows and how much water you put on it. With good movement of air there is always combustion, and Glenda will always be Glenda.'