After Dinner Speakers: Glenda Jackson, Graham Norton, D'Oyly Carte opera company

Actress Glenda Jackson was born in 1936 in Birkenhead, England. As a child, one of four daughters, she loved to go to the movies and admired most those actresses who “seemed to be very capable of conducting their own lives, regardless of the dramas they had to live with,” Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, In 1962, she was spotted by Charles Morowitz while playing one of Alfie’s victims at the Mermaid Theatre, London. Morowitz was exploring the possibilities of Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”. Morowitz and Peter Brook, backed by Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company, set up an experimental “Theatre Cruelty” to explore problems of acting and stagecraft in laboratory conditions. Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar for Women in Love, in which she played the man-destroyer, Gudrum. She has worked with great energy for theatre and film on other fronts too: in 1982 she helped to form the Women’s Playhouse Project and United British Artists, and to produce plays, films, and videos of artistic and social merit. She has lectured on drama at Balliol College, Oxford, and taught courses in acting in the United States.