The night before I am due to meet Glenda Jackson—the actress and Tony Award nominee now starring in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women—at Alice’s Tea Cup on the Upper East Side, I catch sight of a headline in the Los Angeles Times: “My Disastrous Tea With Glenda Jackson.” I pause and consider the situation. Here is a woman in formidable control of her craft at age 82. After a theater and film career that won her accolades and two Oscars, Jackson served for 23 years as a member of Parliament, where she delivered blistering critiques of Thatcherism. She has since reclaimed the stage, first headlining in King Lear at the Old Vic in London, now on Broadway in Albee’s Pulitzer winner from 1994. She doesn’t seem the type to suffer fools.
Fortunately, there is no disaster; there isn’t even tea. Instead, we each order what turns out to be a colossal mug of coffee. “There’s enough there for the whole of New York!” Jackson says with the incredulity that foreigners often express when observing the current state of things in America. In a country run by a former reality-television star, she has a sharp take on the vanities of politics and entertainment. “When I was in Westminster”—home to the houses of Parliament—“you would see these egos brushing up and down the corridors, egos that would not be tolerated for 30 seconds in the theater,” Jackson says. “People would talk about politicians and say to me, ‘Oh, Tony Blair’s just an actor,’ as though actors are trying to cheat us at something! The best theater is trying to tell the truth, and the best politics is trying to tell the truth.”
In a cultural season brimming with raw, resonant productions, Three Tall Women is startlingly good. Jackson plays A, a 92-year-old widow with a caustic snap, determined to keep up appearances (silver marcel waves, rosy lipstick) even as memory loss and bladder accidents set in; the deadpan Laurie Metcalf (B, a home health aide) and Alison Pill (C, a young lawyer) round out the stellar cast. The play is a thorny meditation on age and experience, and Jackson has her own thoughts on the subject. Barefaced and backlit by gray morning light, she shrugs off her wrinkles (which Jane Birkin recently likened to a “wonderful map”), talks about libido in The Golden Girls, and confesses to her lapsed swim regimen. She also makes—in word and deed—an airtight defense of creative potential past what some deem to be retirement age. Here, our conversation over a bottomless cup.
I read that you took up swimming to prepare for King Lear. What about for Three Tall Women? In one sense, the action is confined to a single room, but the dialogue is every bit muscular. Did you gear up in a similar way?
No. My fear with Lear was that I would not have the physical or vocal strength. But this play, it’s all in your head. That was one of the really interesting things when we were rehearsing it: We were all exhausted because it was all up here. There’s no physical energy in that sense. He uses very simple words, he uses them a lot, and he puts them in different places in sentences, so you think, Haven't I just said that?
The issue of stamina is so loaded, as we saw with Trump’s criticism of Hillary Clinton. Do you get the sense that women are relegated to “little old lady” territory?
Oh come on, the hypocrisy that runs around our gender is amazing. If a woman is successful, then she’s deemed to be the exception that proves the rule. If a woman fails, well, we’re all failures. That kind of underlying approach to our gender doesn’t seem to me to have changed an iota. But one of the things that I’ve found interesting—when I was a member of Parliament, I would visit nursing homes and day centers, places where elderly people very often are suffering from illness—is the older we get, the gender definitions begin to fray. The absolutes of male and female just begin to unwind, and I found that very useful when I was doing Lear. But it’s true about the extremes of age—the very young, too. We’re taught how to be boys and girls, aren’t we, in that sense.
And then capital-V virility and capital-F femininity fade away. That, to me, is part of what’s fueling the whole wellness movement now happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Do you participate in that?
What’s wellness?
Good question. That whole world of vitamins and exercises and mindfulness, which includes a lot of fakery—but at the same time, I want to keep my body and my brain healthy for as long as possible.
Absolutely, of course. Reading a book used to be my answer to that. But no [exercise]. I mean, I can because where I’m staying there is an indoor pool in the building. I say to myself every week, “Right, you’re going to start regularly swimming now because you know it’s good for you.” And it is—but it's boring [laughs]. Swimming is really, really boring!
The corollary to wellness is people obsessing over youthfulness. Do you use certain skin creams and such?
I put moisturizer on my face before I put my makeup on at the theater because—as you see—I don’t wear makeup, and I never have. It was kind of par for the course [as an actress]. When I started, you had all that old theater makeup in sticks, and of course for the cinema, it was all done for you. When I was doing Elizabeth R, the last couple of episodes when she was elderly, it used to take them seven hours to make me up! They didn’t have the kind of stuff that’s available to people now. [For this play] it’s just perfectly straightforward: foundation, powder, eyes, lips, that’s it. But because I’ve got a shaky hand, it takes longer than it used to.
When I spoke with Jane Birkin earlier this year, she was talking about magnificent faces and described yours as being “like a wonderful map.” Did you ever feel pressure as an actress to partake in plastic surgery and all the rest?
No, because I was never employed for the way I looked. I’ve never thought of myself as being physically attractive, in that way, so it was never something that applied to me. I don’t know whether it’s arrogance or stupidity, but somebody asked, “Do you worry about the wrinkles on your face?” And I said, “No, I’ve earned this face. I’ve actually lived it. And if you don’t like looking at it, then don’t, but there ain’t anything I can do about it.”
The idea of minimizing expressions with Botox seems almost criminal, given how, as A, you have this whole range of motion that happens just in your face.
Well, I don’t know that because I’m not sat out there! [laughs] But she’s different. One of the pivotal lines, when she’s carrying on about how much she needs what she’s got, is she says, “I have to look pretty.” And that’s so indicative of how she has to function within that society. The standards were set. In her day, what you were—what your value was, in a sense—very much depended on the way you looked. And you still see it. You must never judge the character you’re playing, but when you are involved in bringing that character to light, [it changes] how you see people in the street. Particularly in New York, you still see these clearly extremely rich, elderly women, and their styling of themselves is just amazing. They’re not pretending they’re not the age that they are; they’re not dressing like kids or doing mad things with their hair. But they spend time and they spend money on the way they look. That isn’t the world I live in, but in their world, those rules still apply.
In politics, did you find a different level of judgment in terms of self-presentation? Certainly here, female politicians are so scrutinized.
Exactly the same in my country. When I was elected in 1992, it was the largest number of women MPs in British history [at that time]; there were 35 of us. And it was absolutely rock-hard. You know, a man can be an MP, a man can be a prospective candidate, and all he needs at the most are two dark suits, a few clean shirts, and some ties that don’t cause offense, right? A woman can’t do that. There has been a relaxation of what constitutes formal dressing, I think, but they still have to do it. And still the first criticism is how they look: Theresa May, who is now prime minister of my country, being castigated for wearing leather trousers, which was suddenly a big news item. I mean, come on! And her leopard shoes—that will haunt her for the whole of her life. It’s the 21st bloody century, for God’s sake. What are we on about here?
Speaking of actresses transitioning into government, we have Cynthia Nixon running for governor. Did you face pushback in that career transition?
Cynthia came to see the play! We did Albee’s [Who’s Afraid of] Virginia Woolf together years ago, and then she walks into my dressing room—talk about lines on the face—looking exactly the same as she did 25, 30 years go. Just astounding. I hope she does well. But yes, absolutely. When I went into Parliament, I was expected either to be an airhead who wouldn't know what day of the week it was, or some kind of exotic diva—neither of which applied to me. So I was a big disappointment [laughs].
Actresses often talk about the diminishing number of roles with age. But at this point, have you found new doors opening up?
Well, I mean, King Lear was written how many hundreds of years ago, when women were not allowed to appear on the stage, and Albee’s Three Tall Women was the last but one of his writings. I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don’t find women interesting. Women are rarely if ever the central dramatic engine; they’re there as an adjunct, and that hasn’t changed at all. I mean, what a treat to be with actresses of that caliber [Metcalf and Pill]. Usually there’s only one good woman’s part, and if you’ve got it, you never work with an actress.
One of the most talked-about scenes in the play involves A’s story about her nude husband offering up a diamond bracelet. Beneath all the laughter, there’s an element of surprise: We’re not used to thinking about older women as sexual beings. Do you see that shifting? I think of Isabelle Huppert’s recent roles.
Absolutely; that’s a theme throughout the play, and it’s unpeeled, in a sense. There’s always that kind of age division. Oddly enough, I happened to catch a bit of The Golden Girls, that old series, where that is very much part and parcel of the humor. But it’s put in the context where you can laugh at it and not be scandalized by it, whereas in truth people can be scandalized by the realization that elderly people actually still do have a libido. They do still want that kind of experience of life.
Meanwhile, the rest of life these days seems to revolve around social media.
All these selfies. One of the really scary things is that you’re more real when you’re an image than when you’re you—do you know what I mean? Equally bizarre is the thing where people are constantly on their phones. I mean, they’re walking down the street! Somebody said to me, “We are going to lose the capacity to have conversations face-to-face.” And in a world where all the jobs are going to be done by robots, you think, well, what will be our function? What will a human being be?
There’s talk that digital devices are affecting our capacity for empathy.
Because we’re buried in our screens. What are we going to do? There was a study on babies and children—I think it came out of some fear of just leaving children in front of television screens—and one of the things that I found really intriguing was the [role] of moving images. Yes, you think: It’s through hearing, that’s how we learn to speak and things of that nature. But movement is what causes the brain to start functioning in certain ways, and that goes back to human faces. As far as parents are concerned, you always have to try to be looking at the child when you’re talking to them, because that’s what they’re learning as much as they’re hearing. It’s actually focusing in on the face.
That, to me, sounds like a case for theater: Phones are put away, and you’re left in a room with human beings.
Absolutely. What’s really interesting when it works—and it does work—is it becomes a model for me as an ideal society. You have this group of strangers all sitting in the dark, and some more strangers up there in the light. An energy goes from the light into the dark, and if it works, it’s sent back to the light—it’s increased. So by the end of it all, this kind of perfect circle is created, which is one of the unique aspects of live theater. You don’t get it in the cinema; you don’t get it anywhere else. Bloody machines don’t help create that.
Three Tall Women, directed by Joe Mantello and starring Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, and Alison Pill, runs through June 24.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
