Jackson won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for the romance films Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973), but she did not appear in person to collect either due to work commitments.

On Broadway, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in the revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women (2018) and received nominations for her work in Marat/Sade (1966), Rose (1981), Strange Interlude (1985), and Macbeth (1988).

Her father Harry was a builder, while her mother Joan (née Pearce) worked in a local shop, pulled pints in a pub and was a domestic cleaner.

This included waitressing at The 2i's Coffee Bar, clerical work for a large City of London firm, answering phones for a theatrical agent, and a role at British Home Stores.

She also worked as a Bluecoat at Butlin's Pwllheli holiday resort on the Llŷn Peninsula in North West Wales, where her new husband and fellow actor Roy Hodges was a Redcoat.

[21] The RSC's staging at the Aldwych Theatre of US (1966), a protest play against the Vietnam War, also featured Jackson, and she appeared in its film version, Tell Me Lies.

"[23] In the process of gaining funding for The Music Lovers (1970) from United Artists, Russell explained it as "the story of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac",[24] the couple being the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and Antonina Miliukova, played by Jackson.

[26][27] Jackson was initially interested in the role of Sister Jeanne in The Devils (1971), Russell's next film, but turned it down after script rewrites and deciding that she did not wish to play a third neurotic character in a row.

[47] Fifteen years after the New York engagement of Marat/Sade, Jackson returned to Broadway in Andrew Davies's Rose (1981) opposite Jessica Tandy; both actresses received Tony nominations for their roles.

[49] In 1985, she played Nina Leeds in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude at the Nederlander Theatre in a production which had originated in London the previous year and ran for eight weeks.

[8] John Beaufort for The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "Bravura is the inevitable word for Miss Jackson's display of feminine wiles and brilliant technique.

"[50] Frank Rich in The New York Times thought Jackson, "with her helmet of hair and gashed features", when Leeds is a young woman, "looks like a cubist portrait of Louise Brooks", and later when the character has aged several decades, is "mesmerizing as a Zelda Fitzgeraldesque neurotic, a rotting and spiteful middle-aged matron and, finally, a spent, sphinx-like widow happily embracing extinction.

Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman was intrigued that Jackson did not go in for nobility, but played Racine's feverish queen as if to say that "being skewered in the guts by Cupid is an ugly, bitter, humiliating business".

[57][58] In 1989, Jackson appeared in Ken Russell's The Rainbow, playing Anna Brangwen, mother of Gudrun, the part for which she had won her first Academy Award twenty years earlier.

[63] She returned to the stage at the end of 2016, playing the title role in William Shakespeare's King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre in London, in a production running from 25 October to 3 December.

[88] Jackson appeared in a number of charity films, including a production on behalf of International Year of the Child, Voluntary Service Overseas, and Oxfam.

[89] Jackson's name was linked to several parliamentary seats over the years; she was approached by a Constituency Labour Party (CLP) in Bristol to stand at the 1979 general election, but this did not materialise.

[87][note 1] An approach was also made to her about the possibility of being a candidate for the marginal Welsh seat of Bridgend at the 1983 general election, which she turned down to pursue a humanities degree at Thames Polytechnic.

[90] In 1986, Jackson visited Ethiopia as part of Oxfam's efforts to help with the famine there, and in 1989 she approached Voluntary Service Overseas about the chance of working in Africa for a couple of years.

[93][94][95] Jackson later stated that she felt Britain was being "destroyed" by the policies of the then prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, and the Conservative government, so that she was willing to do "anything that was legal" to oppose them.

[98] Although her party did not win the 1992 general election, as had been speculated, there was an above average swing to Labour in her constituency {with questions raised over the number of deceased persons voting}, and she gained the seat, narrowly beating the Conservative candidate Oliver Letwin, a former adviser to Thatcher.

[99][100][101] Jackson, whose campaign had been sponsored by the train drivers' union, ASLEF, was the first of Labour's 1992 intake to join the front bench when she became shadow transport minister in July 1996.

[102][103] Following Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 general election, which saw her comfortably re-elected, she was appointed as a junior minister in the government of Tony Blair,[104] with responsibility in the London Regional Transport.

[107] As a high-profile backbencher, Jackson became a regular critic of Blair over his plans to introduce higher education tuition fees in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

She also called for him to resign following the Judicial Enquiry by Lord Hutton in 2003 surrounding the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the death of government adviser David Kelly.

[108][109][110][111] At the subsequent 2005 general election, she held her seat, albeit with a reduced majority and a swing to the Conservatives, who had selected local councillor Piers Wauchope.

[113] On 31 October 2006, Jackson was one of 12 Labour MPs to back Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party's call for an inquiry into the Iraq War.

[121][122] Another speech of Jackson's went viral in June 2014 when she gave a scathing assessment of Iain Duncan Smith's tenure as Work and Pensions Secretary, telling him that he was responsible for the "destruction of the welfare state and the total and utter incompetence of his department".

"[136] Jackson's marriage was running into difficulties by the early 1970s, and in 1975, she began an affair with Andy Phillips, the lighting director for the production of Hedda Gabler in which she was starring at the time.

[79] In tribute to Jackson, on the day of her death, the BBC broadcast a repeat of her interview with John Wilson first shown in an edition of This Cultural Life in October 2022,[150] followed by the 2019 drama Elizabeth Is Missing.