Glenda Jackson: The ice queen

The ice queen

So, here I am, waiting to see Glenda Jackson in her office in the big building at 1 Parliament Street, and sitting in reception on one of those drab, grey institutional sofas under a horribly bad portrait of Edward Heath. Still, as experiences go, I suppose it's better than finding oneself pinned under a horribly huge Oliver Reed, although only Ms Jackson could comment on this authoritatively.

So, here I am, waiting to see Glenda Jackson in her office in the big building at 1 Parliament Street, and sitting in reception on one of those drab, grey institutional sofas under a horribly bad portrait of Edward Heath. Still, as experiences go, I suppose it's better than finding oneself pinned under a horribly huge Oliver Reed, although only Ms Jackson could comment on this authoritatively.

And all the while, I'm feeling bloody terrified. She's done quite a few interviews over the years and the words and phrases that are always thrown around are "cold" and "dour" and "totally charmless" and "humourless" and "totally terrifying, like nanny on a bad day", and so on. I am frightened of her, yes. Sometimes, I think part of what made her the great, great actress she was is that you were always too frightened to believe she was anyone other than the character she was playing. Famously, of course, she used to work in Boots, on the billiousness and laxative counter. At this moment, I would dearly like something for the former but have, I can promise you, absolutely no need for the kind of encouragement offered by the latter.

Anyway, I'm eventually collected and led up to her office by a nice girl who says that, even without her guidance, and even if I were blindfolded and twisted around 17 dizzying times, I'd find Ms Jackson's office straight off, because of the fag smell, because of her being a 40-a-dayer. I know what she means when we go through some double doors and – whoosh! – it's like being hit in the face by a thousand ashtrays.

Perhaps, because of this, when I do enter her office she immediately opens the window. It's a beautiful day, true. A fantastic, cloudless, vivid blue sky. But it's bitterly, bitterly cold. I daren't take my coat off. I think about putting my woolly mittens back on. Ms Jackson appears not to feel it, though. Ms Jackson says: "I can't offer you coffee because our café is closed." I'm beginning to think that, yes, this is going to be a pretty cold experience all round.

Her office is, well, barren. No pictures, no portraits (bad or otherwise), no knickknacks, no Oscars (her two are at the back of her airing cupboard at home, she says), no shelf of books, even. Just a map of her constituency – she's been MP for Hampstead & Highgate since 1992 – drawing-pinned to one wall.

It's not exactly homely, I say. You've never been tempted to hang a few things up? "No, I've never got round to bringing the hammer..." Now 66, she's as wonderfully Slav-boned and Tartar-eyed as ever, with baby-fine hair and quite big ears decorated with little gold, bobbing earrings. Her mouth, a stern, resolutely unlipsticked affair, hangs on to those Dunhill Internationals as if for dear life. She is wearing something grey.

Later, I ask her what she spends her money on. "Books," she says. Who do you like? "I read a lot of detective stories, but Jane Austen is top of the list." Did you see the BBC's great adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? "Is that the one where whatsisname plunged into the lake?" she asks. "Doesn't sound like my Austen." So, just books then? "I occasionally have splurges on clothes when I think I can't carry on wearing the same ones anymore." Do you have to take a deep breath before hitting the shops? "I do. It's not my favourite occupation, by any means. I tend to go to the Army & Navy because it's near, and I pop into Jaeger sometimes to see if they have Jean Muir stuff I can afford."

Are you ever extravagant? "Wildly extravagant?" she questions, alarmed. Yes, wildly extravagant. "No. Not wildly." Mildly, then? "Mildly extravagant?" she questions, with no apparent decrease in alarm. Yes, mildly. "The first time I bought a Hoover as opposed to... what do you call those things... carpet sweepers? I shook all the way home. I could hear my mother saying: 'What do you want that for? What's wrong with a dustpan and brush?'" So, never extravagant, no. A lover of little economies, even? "Oh, yes. I use my old nylon tights to tie plants on to trellises, use old knickers for dusters, rip up towels for washing-up cloths and things like that." (Indeed, as Walter Matthau once said of her: "Glenda spends less in a year then my wife does in an afternoon.")

Actually, I'd been warned that, given the chance, she'd evoke her poor, Merseyside background – mother a charlady, father a bricklayer, three younger sisters all living in a two-up, two-down with no bathroom or inside loo – as if it were a credential, which possibly it is. Still, I go with it. It does seem to jolly her up.

Did your mother ever make it to Hoover ownership?

"Eventually, I bought her and my father a house and put in central heating and she would never put it on. I'd go to visit in the depths of winter and say: 'It's freezing in this house,' and she'd say: 'What? I can't stand this heat. Open the window, open the window.'"

She laughs, showing those curiously crooked teeth. I laugh, showing, I guess, curiously chattering ones. How amusing, to open all windows in the depths of winter! Working-class folk, what rum'uns they are. You know, though, it occurs to me that – brought up as she was, in that hard-working frugal way – acting, with its high financial rewards and perceived glamour, just wasn't morally virtuous enough for her. But to give up everything – the frocks, the Oscars, the huge dollops of dosh, the dishy leading men, the possibility of Hello! popping round to check out your lovely home – to become a politician? Politicians are the more virtuous moral beings? I put it to her that for anyone seeking truth and wisdom, surely they'd be more likely to find it in great plays and great performances rather than in politics.

"In Shakespeare, without question," she says. So? "At its best, politics is trying to tell the truth." This seems an odd thing to say, in the light of her intense opposition to war on Iraq. ("I'm very proud of my party. It's my government I'm ashamed of," she recently said in Parliament.) Surely, such opposition can only be based on the suspicion that the Government is not telling the truth. Is this politics at its worst? Possibly. "I never in my life thought I'd hear a British government of any persuasion, especially after the debacle of Suez, commit to going on a pre-emptive strike against anyone, but that a Labour government should do it! They're trying to take us from a country I have always respected to just another aggressive little bully on the block."

Do you admire Tony Blair in any way? Long, horrible silence. Then: "I certainly admire the fact we won so overwhelmingly in 1997." Anything else? Another long, horrible silence. Then: "I'm not turning this into a personal rant against the Prime Minister." Oh, go on, I want to say. Do, do, do. Be a devil. But I know she won't. Always the most compellingly truthful of actresses, someone who stripped bare (literally and metaphorically) rather than embellished or evaded, how can she bear it?

You puzzle people, I tell her. "Really? How?" she snaps, all gimlet-eyed. The ease with which you gave up what you gave up. The urge, even, to give up what you gave up. "What did I give up?" Um, your gift? OK, you once said that the House is full of former lawyers, generals, teachers, doctors, and no one asks them why they gave up what they gave up. But it's not the same. "Isn't it?" No, because you had a fabulous ability for what you did. "Did I?" Oh, for God's sake. What I'm trying to say here is that it's like Yehudi Menuhin packing it all in to become a social worker. Admirable, but such a horrible waste.

"If what I had been doing before I tossed my hat into the ring received that amount of automatic respect, I'd agree with you, but it doesn't. Actors are still regarded as being basically frivolous." Maggie Smith, I say, Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave – are they all seen as basically frivolous?

"And yet," she says, "if they step out of their boxes they are dubbed luvvies, aren't they? That doesn't strike me as being necessarily respectful." And politicians are respected? Actually, I stupidly didn't ask that, stupidly didn't think of it at the time. I could kick myself and will, I think, once I thaw out and can bend at the knee again.

Certainly, it's as if she completely extinguished one person to become another. I wonder if she ever feels that a totally different person had that thespian life. "No," she says. Yet she seems to have severed all connection with it. Do you ever watch any of your old performances? "No." Do you ever catch them by mistake, last thing at night on telly, for instance? "No."

This is not proving an especially productive line of questioning. OK, one last try. Do you go to the theatre any more? "I don't have the time." What's the last thing you saw? "Peter Brook's The Man Who at the Lyttleton." That, I've since worked out, was 12 years ago! Films, then? Is she a movie-goer? No, she says, "but I occasionally get films out on video. What films am I waiting for? That Swedish film – or is it Danish? – about a family gathering for dinner." Festen? "Yes. I'd like to see Festen. It sounds interesting." And not Two Weeks Notice, starring Hugh Grant and Sarah Bullock? "Why do you automatically presume that?" she asks. "Have their names been mentioned in any way, shape or form?" She gives a dry little chuckle. Glenda is having a joke!

What do we know of the private Glenda? Well, she lives in Blackheath, with her grown-up son, Daniel. She had married his father, Roy Hodges, a theatre director, at 21 but they divorced in 1976 and then she lived for five years with a lighting engineer, Andy Phillips. There appears to have been no one since. I have no idea if she is lonely or not. Possibly not. Possibly she finds her own company sufficient. However, when I ask if she's ever regretted leaving school at 16 and not going on to further education she says: "Well, I tried twice." Did you? "I enrolled with the Open University twice – first for social studies, then a foundation course in the humanities - and dropped out twice." You don't strike me as a giver-upper, I say. "No, I don't think I am," she says. "But perhaps the task of learning all on your own..." And her voice trails away with surprising wistfulness.

I ask what she does for fun. Does she ever go on holiday, for example? "Not just to holiday," she says. "Last year, for instance, I was invited to New Zealand to give a lecture, so I took more time than the lecture comprised. In that sense, I did have a holiday. Generally. I'm not a holiday person. I'd sooner be in my own backyard." She likes to garden, she says. "Ideally, I would like to grow veggies, but my garden is surrounded by trees. They take away too much light. Veggies need light." When, I wonder, did she last experience a moment of pure happiness? "Gosh, I think it was probably this morning when the sun was shining. It's so wonderful to have brightness of light and a blue sky after all that grey." I'll open a window to that, I don't say. She says. "I've got to go in exactly three minutes."

She makes to leave. Snaps the window shut. (Oh, great. Bit late now.) Puts on a scarlet coat. "Very old. My campaigning coat." We go down in the lift together, and then she leaves me abruptly at the front of the building. She once said that, while always political, it was Margaret Thatcher's "no such thing as society" speech that prompted her to go into politics proper. "I was so outraged." I wonder now if, perhaps, she likes the idea of society rather more than she actually likes people. On the other hand, maybe she just isn't capable of the usual artifices, and has given up the acting on all fronts. Maybe having been spatchcocked by Oliver Reed just has that effect. Who knows? All I know is that, as I make my way home, all I can think of is finding some warmth.