Guy Lodge Film Critic “She’s 100% a professional, and this is a great night for professionals,” said the actor Juliet Mills as she accepted Glenda Jackson’s first Best Actress Oscar on the absent winner’s behalf at the 1970 Academy Awards.
On the face of it, it sounds an oddly impersonal thing to say in the circumstances — almost as if Mills knew nothing of Jackson, and opted for the vaguest praise possible. (In fact, it was probably a veiled dig at that year’s Best Actor winner, George C.
Scott, who had rather more acrimoniously declined to attend the awards.) It proved, however, a rather apt way for Jackson, then 34, to be welcomed into Hollywood’s inner circle.
A proudly working-class Brit who didn’t look or act (on screen or off) like the blushing English roses typically imported from across the pond, Jackson had markedly more interest in being a professional actor than in being a movie star.
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