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Ms. Jackson is one of a quartet of English actresses who are film and stage stars on both sides of the Atlantic [[start column 1 of 2]] gets to 40 there's really nothing to stretch her in the classical theatre until she gets to 60 and can start on the old Shakespearian hags. In some curious way the fact that there are so few great middle-aged parts for women affects their standing in the theatre. Men of that age get to play great leaders, but because we don't, nobody then thinks of us as leaders. You can't force a writer to create a role he doesn't want to write - which is why the women's groups [[image - black and white photo of Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau]] [[caption]] With Walter Matthau in the movie Hopscotch [[/caption]] in the theatre have had to be so narrowly feminist. The theatre is still at its highest reaches a male preserve." Divorced now from Roy Hodges, but still living in her Blackheath, London, home with a son and a sister, Glenda Jackson manages to keep her private life just that. "One of the good things about the English theatre is that you can go home at night after work and not be disturbed. In America, especially in Hollywood, all that hustling for work means that you never really get to go home at all. But I'm very happy working in California or on Broadway as long as I know it is for a limited season and that I'll get back to Blackheath afterwards." A two-time Oscar winner (for A Touch of Class and Women in Love, the latter a film for which she got barely five thousand dollars) and the holder of countless stage awards, Glenda Jackson has a simple working philosophy: "I won't work just to pay off the tax. I can only do a film or a play if I really like [[end column]] [[start column]] the script. Acting is hard enough, God knows, when you are doing what you think is right for you. If you think it may be the wrong script, then it gets really impossible to do. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best performances are the ones you give before you know what can go wrong. The older you get, the more terrifying it all becomes. "In Britain they all pay lip service to the company ideal, but deep down the old star system still operates and you get one or two people carrying a show while the rest avoid much responsibility for its success or failure. There's still a great belief that you shouldn't show how much you care, how much theatre matters to you, so a sort of apathy sets in and actors in a long run tend just to turn up for a couple of hours in the evening and think that they've done the job. "I worry about the future generally, though not much about my future. I just go on doing films and plays that I like and if they work out, well that's fine. If not, on to the next. You can't worry about reviews, at any rate not film reviews. If they are bad, then it's a delayed wake; if good, then a distanced celebration. Either way they are not going to change a single frame of the picture. Theatre reviews are different, and you kind of hope they are going to be constructive or useful instead of the boring old end-of-term reports that most papers still publish." Ms. Jackson's former husband once said of her - "If she had gone into politics, she'd now be Britain's Prime Minister. If she had taken to crime, she would be Jack the Ripper." More charitably, one might add that in Hollywood 30 years ago, she'd have been Bette Davis. And, of course, today she's Rose. For somebody who started out in the theatre 20 years ago on $20 a week, the daughter of a Birkenhead bricklayer, Glenda Jackson can't be said to be doing too badly. [[line]] Sheridan Morley is the London drama critic of Punch and the International Herald Tribune. 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