In 1970, at 14-years-old, I was simply crazy for her performance in Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers where she plays the rapacious Russian countess who fails to bed Richard Chamberlain as gay Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Glenda Jackson plays his biggest fan, Antonina Ivanovna Miliukova. After seeing it, I could think of little else for weeks.
The Music Lovers is a swinging account of Tchaikovsky’s tragic marriage to a woman and his final days, and it brought Jackson to the attention of film fans. United Artists agreed to finance it following the success of Women In Love. Russell later wrote that: “…if I hadn’t told United Artists that it was a story about a homosexual who fell in love with a nymphomaniac it might have never been financed.”
The film was originally titled Tchaikovsky. It focuses on the period of 1874–76 which Russell felt was the most dynamic in the composer’s life. The screenplay by Melvin Bragg is inspired by Beloved Friend (1937), a collection of letters from Tchaikovsky. The title was changed to The Lonely Heart so as not to be confused with Tchaikovsky, a Russian film from 1969, which ignores the whole gay thing. The film’s title is officially: Ken Russell’s Film On Tchaikovsky And The Music Lovers.
Russell:
“The film is about the fact that Tchaikovsky couldn’t love anyone even though he wrote some of the world’s most beautiful music. He loved himself really and his sister. The film is about how artists transcend personal problems, how he used these problems and their results to create this particular kind of music. There’s as much tranquility in my film on Tchaikovsky as there is in his music. Great heroes are the stuff of myth and legend, not facts. Music and facts don’t mix. Tchaikovsky said: ‘My life is in my music.’ And who can deny that the man’s music is not utterly fantastic? So likewise, the movie! I sought to honor his genius by offering up my own small portion of his courage to create.”
Russell offered the two lead roles to Jackson and Bates. Both accepted, but Bates changed his mind, thinking it might not be good for his image to play two gay roles one after the other.
The studio wanted a star to play Tchaikovsky, but Russell had a hard time finding anyone who would do it. Of Chamberlain, Russell said: “I’d only seen him as a bland TV doctor.” He changed his mind after seeing Chamberlain in a television series of Portrait of a Lady (1968). When he discovered that Chamberlain was a skilled pianist, the actor was cast.
Jackson said at the time: “I think people will love it or hate it but I doubt that anyone will go away feeling nothing. I think it’s really quite extraordinary.”
Jackson disappeared from showbiz to do some politicking for three decades, but she returned in 2018 and received a Tony Award for her trouble. Jackson claimed that she cared nothing about awards, making me wonder where she kept her two Academy Awards, her pair of Emmy Awards, and that Tony. The two Oscars, neither of which she showed up to collect, were for Women In Love, where she plays a free-thinking sculptor who walks away from a romance to pursue her own ambitions, and for A Touch Of Class (1973), where her character is a divorced fashion designer who has an affair with a married man, just for the hot sex.
She appears in three films featuring bisexual love triangles: The Music Lovers, Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), and Women In Love.
Based on D.H. Lawrence‘s 1920 novel Women In Love, it was Russell’s first real big commercial success, and it features a fireside nude wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, which as a young teen, jolted me right into being gay. This scene apparently made the actors feel anxious, to say nothing of the audiences and censors. With a provocative screenplay by the late, great gay hero Larry Kramer, Women In Love brought both Russell and Kramer Academy Award nominations and made Russell a director not to be ignored. Kramer was adamant about giving the role to Jackson. She was, at the time, well-regarded in theatrical circles. As a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company she had gained a great deal of attention as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade.
Jackson remarked she preferred Women In Love to The Music Lovers “because it had the better script and that makes all the difference“.
Jackson walked away from acting to serve as a member of Parliament for 23 years. She left politics in 2015, not because she wanted to retire but because ”it was time for someone else to have a go”. She had no plans to pick-up her acting career again, but she started to get some interesting offers. Then, fearlessly, she took on the title role in William Shakespeare‘s King Lear at the Old Vic. For the demanding, physical role, Jackson went to her community pool every morning and swam to build her stamina. She received rave reviews. A woman portraying the broken-down king was not a new idea. Jackson made no effort to look like a man in the production. Jackson:
”One of the interesting things for me about Lear, what I’ve found is that as we get older, those hard-drawn territorial lines that define gender, which we are subject to the minute we are born, begin to fray, to blur. We’re all human. Regardless of the envelope. The really interesting thing is the issue about age, I mean, for our age now, certainly for the western world, because there have been incredible advances in medical and psychological science. We are living longer. But are we living longer, or are we existing?”
Most actors, when they have stupendous success in showbiz, are happy moving up in social status. Jackson remained true to her working-class roots, and to the people she represented as a Minister of Parliament. She owned her indignation, and she spent most of it working on other people’s behalf. When running for that Parliament seat, Jackson went door to door, seeking support. During her time in Parliament, she delivered a resounding denunciation of all things Margaret Thatcher, saying:
”…everything I had been taught as a vice under Thatcherism, was in fact a virtue. My country is being destroyed. When I heard Mrs. Thatcher say there was no such thing as a society, I was so furious, I walked into my French door and nearly broke my nose!”
Andrew Faulds, who plays one of Tchaikovsky’s lovers in The Music Lovers, served with Jackson as Labour Party MPs in the British House of Commons from 1992 to 1997, and the screenwriter, Bragg was a Labour member in the House of Lords.
Back in the 1970s, I was obsessed with Jackson. She had quite a run for a while. In 1971, in order to play Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth R (1971) on the BBC, Jackson shaved her head, and then won two Emmys. That same year, she also portrayed Queen Elizabeth I in the film Mary, Queen Of Scots, had an unforgettable small turn in Russell’s musical The Boy Friend, and won a BAFTA for her role in gay director John Schlesinger‘s proactive Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Melvin Frank saw her comedic potential and offered her A Touch Of Class, and she won an Oscar. In 1978, she scored big at the box-office in the romantic comedy House Calls, with Walter Matthau. They made such a great comic team, Jackson and Matthau were paired again in the comedy Hopscotch (1980).
She still has one more film in the can; Michael Caine and Jackson first worked together in The Romantic Englishwoman in 1976, and they appear together again in The Great Escaper, opening in theatres this summer.
For more on the passing of Jackson, see World of Wonder writer Trey Speegle‘s #RIP here.
