The world has seemed like a procession of deaths lately. Generally, of those in old age. Of all of them, one of the most striking was that of Glenda Jackson who was arguably the very greatest actress of her high and mighty generation.

They say that no one under the age of 55 could be automatically expected to know her name because she was not one of the great British actors who was resurrected by the Harry Potter films like Maggie Smith.

It’s extraordinary to contemplate: a woman who won two Oscars, one for Ken Russell’s film of Women in Love, the other for the champagne elegance of her romantic comedy A Touch of Class with George Segal and the person who gave her the good news (given that Glenda Jackson was the last person on earth to go to the Academy Awards) was Bette Davis, a legendary actor with whom Jackson shared an intensity which could encompass the risk of excess to find the truth of a role. Glenda Jackson played Hedda Gabler here in Melbourne in 1976 with what was in fact an icy restraint which could encompass worlds. Of all the people who have essayed Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, it’s her performance in the original stage production by Peter Brook which he filmed that stays longest in the mind. Such ice, such fire.

She was the Cleopatra to die for when she did it, again for Brook, with Alan Howard as the great lover she dreams of.

But the girl from the working background was a knockout as a queen, not least in the BBC Elizabeth R which is far and away the greatest impersonation of that figure we have. And many years later when Margaret Thatcher died, Glenda Jackson gave a thunderous denunciation in the House of Commons of the Iron Lady she abhorred. ‘A woman? Not on my terms.’ She spoke of the working women of England who had toiled and fought and loved in times of direst necessity.

Glenda Jackson famously gave up acting when she was in her mid-fifties to enter parliament. This woman who had played the obsessive Phèdre and who said that Lady Macbeth was too small a role – though she eventually did it with Christopher Plummer, rehearsed by Australia’s Zoe Caldwell – entered parliament and served in Tony Blair’s government (though she condemned his role in the second Gulf War, as she condemned everything she disapproved of). She spoke with passion about how badly Theresa May was treated, she said that the difference between Thatcher and Boris Johnson was that Thatcher at least believed in democracy whereas Boris only believed in Boris. She didn’t mince her words about anyone. Of Olivier: ‘Sir Laurence puts on a good show for the audience but he does not move me as an actor.’ On the Hollywood studio system: ‘They had Marlon Brando, the greatest actor of his generation and what did they give him? The Teahouse of the August Moon. There is nothing wrong with The Teahouse of the August Moon but it does not require the talents of Marlon Brando.’

In the end she went back to the stage and won a Tony in 2018 for Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and then at the age of 80 she played King Lear. If ever a woman could take on this tempest and torment of a part it was Glenda Jackson with the extraordinary power of that mezzo voice, so stark and strong and craggy.

She was a woman for the ages – a supreme actor who was also an admirable human being. It’s pleasing to think of her going upstairs to have dinner with her Daily Mail columnist son and his family just as it’s cheering to see she’s in one last film The Great Escaper, with Michael Caine.

So many of the great figures who have died lived into high old age so it was almost strange to watch a documentary about Raul Julia, the great Puerto Rican actor who took the world by storm in Kiss of the Spider Woman. He died in 1994 at the age of 54. We see him deliver Edmund’s speech from King Lear ‘Thou Nature art my goddess’ – almost accentless but with great individual power and we see him as a stupendously irresistible Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew with Meryl Streep as his Kate. At one point she spits straight in his face and with a kind of mesmerising delectation he licks up the spittle.

We see him in The Threepenny Opera and as Guido in Nine, the musical based on Fellini’s 8 ½. Who else could match the original Marcello Mastroianni with the sheer elegance Raul Julia did. It’s a dazzling career and one of its most remarkable qualities is the way Raul Julia shifts from role to role like a great character actor even though he glitters wherever he goes. He leads Angelica Huston through the flamenco in The Addams Family and when William Hurt picked up the Oscar for Spider Woman he admitted this was because of Raul Julia.

Then there’s his acting in the title role of Romero, the story of the archbishop who stood up to the thugs in El Salvador and was honoured as a saint. The 1989 film was produced by the Paulist Fathers, so that you didn’t realise at the time that it was directed by Australia’s John Duigan, with an easeful transparency of effect.

Romero is a story of heroism and martyrdom and Raul Julia gives a staggering performance because he never allows himself to show the big guns of his consummate technique until the quiet man of God is driven to thunder. It is an extraordinarily unactorish performance which only a great actor could possibly have effected.

Raul Julia would be 83 if he was alive. Like Glenda Jackson he believed in acting and in something more than acting. A pursuit of ‘the Good’, perhaps, or the truth.

His peers seemed to have thought of him as a god. It was good too that the lights went out in the West End for Glenda Jackson, a woman who spoke with all her mind and heart and soul and had those things to speak from.