Glenda Jackson, two-time academy award winner and ex-Labour MP returned to the stage in 2016 as King Lear in a sell-out run at the Old Vic … and all at the ripe old age of 82. Her performance was enough to secure her as our lead winner, the ‘Oldie of the Year’, as well as our ‘Lear of the Year.’ Oldie theatre critic, Paul Bailey, described her performance as ‘magnificent and venomously witty.’ He goes on to say she is ‘forceful when it’s necessary, and reluctantly vulnerable when Lear’s world is falling apart. did I write ‘she’? The fact is that that Jackson makes you forget the she’s a woman. Hers is a Lear who might just be Everyman.’
