'An actress like Glenda makes you believe she's beautiful': Jackson with Oliver Reed in » Women in love. Credit & Copyright: Alamy.
Glenda Jackson, who passed away at the age of 87, enjoyed the rare double feat of being both a highly successful politician and one of the leading actresses of the 20th century, deservingly winning two Oscars for her illustrious career both on stage and screen. The second Oscar she won for the 1973 romantic comedy-drama A Touch of Class was proper recognition for a decent and classy performance in a decent and stylish film that is still fondly remembered to this day.
However, the picture for which she first won an Academy Award, Ken Russell's inimitable 1969 adaptation of Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, was considerably less restrained. It received widespread acclaim upon release, but went on to — and undeservedly — become a camp classic thanks to the infamous nude wrestling match scene between its male stars Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. But there is also the moment when the former Labor MP for Hampstead and Kilburn utters the immortal phrase, understandably, to a bewildered young man: “How are your hips? They are strong? Because I want to drown in the flesh. Hot, physical, naked, flesh.”
Many would argue that Jackson deserved an Oscar just because she delivered this moment with a straight face. But in fact, her performance throughout the film as the artist Gudrun Brangwen, who becomes involved in a four-way relationship with her sister Ursula and their two friends, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, was a masterpiece of restrained passion.
When she was chosen, she was by no means a well-known international figure. She had success on stage with the RSC since the early sixties (most notably as Ophelia opposite David Warner's Hamlet in Peter Hall's legendary 1965 production) and reprized her stage role as Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook's film based on Peter's play Weiss «Marat/Garden», but she never starred in a major film.
It didn't help that Russell, who would become her frequent collaborator, though not always harmoniously, actively resisted her choice. However, as always with this particular director, chaos and artistic genius went hand in hand, and the final results spoke for themselves.
The genesis of the film came in the mid-sixties, when American filmmaker and later Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Larry Kramer achieved some success with the 1968 sex comedy Here We Go Around the Mulberry Bush. He contacted Canadian director Silvio Narizzano, who suggested that Kramer make a film adaptation of Lawrence's Women in Love: the novel's strong sexual themes would have been unthinkable to adapt in earlier times, but given the rise in permissiveness and the opportunity to depict human behavior frankly and explicitly on screen, the possibility now seemed viable.
However, after Kramer first commissioned then-fashionable playwright David Mercer to adapt the novel, and this led to what he later called «a terrible Marxist treatise», Kramer wrote the screenplay himself. As he said: “I became a writer not by choice, but by necessity… I wanted to show that you can convey emotion along with action, and that ideas, conversations and beautiful scenery are not incompatible in films. My first draft was purely dialogue, the second was mostly visual. The end result was a combination of both.»
He freely roamed Lawrence's writings, saying that while «just over half» of the finished film was taken from the novel, he also used poetry, essays, and the author's letters to create an unorthodox but effective screenplay that simultaneously would do justice to women in love and Lawrence's broader sensibilities.
Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson in Women in Love. Photo: Rex
It took an unorthodox director to shoot Kramer's script with the care it deserved, and he was initially unable to find a suitable director; after Narizzano pulled out of the project for personal reasons—in a touch that Lawrence himself may have sympathized with, the director left his wife for a man who then died shortly after—Kramer turned to such disparate figures as Stanley Kubrick, Brook, and the director of The Innocents Jack Clayton, and they all refused.
With some desperation, he turned to Russell, who at the time was well known for his experimental and often complex BBC films about composers such as Elgar, Bartok and Debussy, but not considered a commercially viable director: his only major picture to date is a Len Deighton adaptation. A Billion Dollar Brain failed despite the lucrative presence of Michael Caine starring the taciturn spy Harry Palmer. He was not interested in literature either, preferring classical music. He was not an obvious choice to create the picture.
Russell, however, soon became a fully paid fan of Lawrence in general and of Women in Love in particular, which he called «probably the finest English novel ever written». He was lucky that the two high-profile United Artists producers who were to produce the film were fans of the visual chic of The Billion Dollar Brain and informed him that, in Russell's recollection, «they thought the right side had made a rough deal.» critics and that I could do better with a prettier theme.»
Glenda Jackson and Jenny Linden in Women in Credit with Love: Alami
He began a harmonious collaboration with Kramer to revise the script, which included the later infamous nude wrestling match. He feared this would cause censorship problems, but Oliver Reed, who had worked with Russell on numerous occasions, talked him into it, or rather forced him; The director later recalled that «he wrestled me in Jiu-Jitsu style in my kitchen and wouldn't let me go until I said, 'OK, OK, you win, I'll do it.'»
>Russell found casting for the film difficult because, in his candid assessment, he was «completely out of touch with real talent». He chose Reid to play Gerald—despite the fact that the dark-haired actor differed from the book's description of him as «light, icy, and Nordic»—and was delighted to find that Alan Bates, whom Kramer singled out as the perfect cast since Birkin, if ever either a movie is made, grew a beard that made him look physically like Lawrence himself.
Casting for the female leads was generally more difficult. Jenny Linden, still best known for her roles in sci-fi and horror films, was cast as Ursula as more established actresses such as Faye Dunaway turned down the role, finding Gudrun's character more interesting.
Glenda Jackson in Women in Love. Author: Alami. who he wanted «young Bette Davis», he was not thrilled. He may have agreed with her former co-star Lyn Pinckney, who said of her that she was «flat as a pancake, no makeup, [and] with long, unattractive hair.»
Pinkney also said, very importantly, «An actress like Glenda makes you believe she's beautiful.» Russell initially felt that the shy Jackson lacked the presence that Gudrun's character needed, but at Kramer's suggestion, he watched her performance at Marat/Sade and was immediately converted. As he said, «It wasn't until then that I realized what a great screen person she was.»
During filming, Jackson was pregnant — with her son Dan Hodges, who would later become a political commentator — and thus was spared the nude scenes that involved Reid and Bates. «Music Lovers», in which she played Tchaikovsky's wife Nina.)
Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jenny Linden and Eleanor Bron in Women in Love
She later spoke of her relationship with Russell with tenderness, albeit annoyance. Saying of the director that «he didn't really understand the actors,» Jackson commented, «He was a thug…he always knew what he didn't want and never knew what he did until you showed him.» But he created an atmosphere, a climate that excites the imagination.”
When the film was released in theaters, it generated controversy for its nudity—as Russell and Kramer had expected—but it was not cut and was a significant box office success, tripling its budget at the international box office. Russell and Jackson would collaborate together on a further four occasions, including the 1989 Women in Love prequel Rainbow, in which Jackson played Gudrun's character's mother Anna Brangwen, but it was her appearance here that propelled her career as well as awards. . As critic Brian MacFarlane remarked, «Her dazzling intelligence, sexual defiance and edginess served a superbly written role in a film with a passion rarely seen in the annals of British cinema.»
If Jackson had read this, she would have reacted with great composure. In an interview with the Guardian shortly after the release of Women in Love, she said: «I'm pretty sure I'll never be recognized anyway, because I never look outside the way I look at everything I play. «.
Nonetheless, the article concludes, «Certainly she will be one of the first female movie stars to break all the rules.» And so it turned out throughout her remarkable career.
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