I never saw any of Glenda Jackson‘s landmark performances on the Broadway stage — not her Nina Leeds in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (’85) nor her commanding titular turn in King Lear (’19) nor her Tony Award-winning perf in Three Tall Women (’18). And I never saw her perform anything in her 20s, and before this morning I’d never even noticed her bit as a partygoer in Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life (’63) when she was 26 or thereabouts.

It probably goes without saying that I paid very little attention to her political career, which lasted from ’92 to ’15.

All I ever knew and loved about Jackson came from her sweet-spot period, which primarily occured in the ’70s and lasted roughly a decade (’69 to ’80). It happened between her Oscar-winning performance as the eccentric and perversely feminist Gudrun in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love (’69), which was made when she was 32 or 33, and her second and final escapist comedy with Walter Matthau, Hopscotch (’80), when she was 43 or 44.

Jackson’s most emotionally relatable ’70s performance, hands down and no debating, was Alex Greville in John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday (’71), a melancholy romantic triangle film that happens to be one of my all-time favorites.

Other performing highlight films from this period included The Music Lovers (as Peter Tchaikovsky’s doomed wife, Nina), Mary, Queen of Scots (as Queen Elizabeth), Bequest to the Nation, the sophisticated romcom A Touch of Class (which resulted in her second Best Actress Oscar), The Romantic Englishwoman (’75), Hedda, House Calls (her first comedy with Walter Matthau), Lost and Found (her second outing with George Segal, released in ’79), and the title role in Robert Enders‘ Stevie (’78), about the British poet Stevie Smith.

Jackson passed today (Thursday, 6.15) at her London home. She was 87.