Glenda Jackson

“Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher's government out I was prepared to do. I could not believe what she was doing to this country.”

“Usually, if there is a woman's part in a piece, there's only one, so you've got no other actresses to work with.”

“Why put make-up on when you only have to take it off again?”

“As I've had occasion to say before, I'm a pretty anti-sociable Socialist.”

“The best theater is trying to tell the truth, and the best politics is trying to tell the truth.”

“I was blessed by my parents and my antecedents by a very strong work ethic. I mean, being a Member of Parliament is 24/7, just as much as when you're actually doing a play. It's not quite 24/7, but it's the work that counts.”

“I've always been ambitious to be very good at what I do.”

“One hell of an outlay for a very small return, with most of them.”

“You don't do a play to compete for an award. This was the argument I always had over the Oscars. I didn't win them. They were given to me. All I did was 2 films. People always say the analogy is Olympic gold medals.”

“Rock Hudson. He was an absolute human being. Charming, funny, real.”

“My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.”

“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.”

“You've got to sing like you don't need the money.”

“Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.”

“My money goes to my agent, then to my accountant and from him to the tax man.”

“When I was feeding myself by being a professional actress, I never got a good notice in the 'Evening Standard.' And when I changed direction and became a Labour MP, I was the wrong political party for the 'Evening Standard.'”

“It would be nice if education was free to everyone who wanted it, but that's not the world we live in.”

“I studiously avoid any academic dissections of the play and any kind of previous experience of playing. For me, it's all in the play.”

“I've always said the first duty of life is to live it, and I do believe that. And we delude ourselves if we think it's not going to end. How we individually meet that, I think, is entirely individual.”

“It always amazed me - it still does - that people offer me work. And when the theater was my basic bread and butter, every time a show finished, I was convinced I would never work again.”