Judy Garland a star born to shine brightly, repeatedly
There is something about Judy Garland, who died in 1969, that attracts imitators.
The most singular of talents, frequently imitated. A star whose rise and fall and rise and fall became an essential part of her narrative. A uniquely accomplished singer, dancer and actress whose power lay partly in her frailty, partly in her ability to transcend and deny that frailty.
In a new biopic, Judy, opening in Australia next month, Renee Zellweger plays Judy Garland in the final year of her life at her most fragile and resourceful.
Most of the film is set in London, where Garland arrived in 1968, accompanied by her fifth husband. It was five years since she had made a film, the aptly titled I Could Go on Singing. She was sick and broke, she had children and ex-husbands to support, and a five-week engagement at the Talk of the Town was something she desperately needed.
Zellweger — who does her own singing in the film — is already being hailed as an Oscar frontrunner for her vision of the character that’s as much about empathy as it is about verisimilitude.
There are others before her who have played or channelled Garland: Zellweger is in a line that stretches from Judy Davis to Rufus Wainwright, Chrissy Amphlett to Ariana Grande, Sigrid Thornton to Patty Duke.
It’s a tradition in which imitation could never be enough. A sense of the authentic self is at the heart of Garland as a performer. She was her own storyteller. As her film career went through highs and lows and sometimes stalled completely, she found a way to connect directly with her public through concerts and television performances, a carefully selected body of work that affirmed her in all her fragility and immediacy.
Ann Miller, a fellow musical star, once talked about Garland’s impact live, describing “a force field around her that was so powerful it would reach the back of that house”. One of her biographers, Gerald Clarke, spoke about the authenticity she projected on screen and in concert. “You never feel she’s acting,” he said. “It’s the same when she’s singing. There’s nothing between her and the audience. It’s raw emotion … Judy put the words before the music. It was as if she were telling a story. It was always as if you were hearing it for the first time. She was a miniature Scheherazade.’’
Yet contradiction is also at the centre of Garland’s performing identity, on and off screen. Director George Cukor asked her to sing Happy Birthday at a party he gave when Ethel Barrymore turned 70, and he recalled her singing “with such feeling and emotion that I thought Ethel would dissolve in tears”. It was his first inkling that she could be a great dramatic actress. He went on to direct her in A Star is Born.
He also remembers her ability to restage trauma as comedy. When her subject was herself, “she could talk about the most devastating experiences of her childhood … and have you screaming with laughter”.
Garland had plenty to tell. A child of vaudeville parents, a focus of ruthless maternal ambitions, signed at 13 to MGM, she was placed on a regimen of stimulants and sleeping pills, hectored about weight loss and image, subject to predatory behaviour and given ingenue roles that sidelined and underused her.
She was 17 when she made The Wizard of Oz (1939), playing Dorothy with the most potent combination of earnestness, yearning and regret. Meet Me in St Louis (1944) — a musical that’s equal parts light and darkness — was the first film that centred on her as a romantic figure. By 1950, with Summer Stock, her MGM years were over.
Four years later, with A Star is Born, she gave her finest performance — and one of cinema’s most memorable performances. It’s a film whose themes of ambition, celebrity, performance, creativity, pain and addiction, shared between the characters played by Garland and her co-star, James Mason, once again summon up autobiographical elements from her life and career.
There were other movies along the way that she had embarked on only to be replaced, including The Barkleys of Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun and Royal Wedding.
A year before she went to London, she was set to co-star in a movie featuring a character whose self-destructive behaviour was based on her own. Valley of the Dolls, adapted from Jacqueline Susann’s bestseller, was a story of young women, fame, exploitation and addiction — the “dolls” of the title are prescription pills. Duke, starring alongside Sharon Tate and Barbara Parkins, plays Neely O’Hara, a talented singer and actor who develops a dependence on alcohol and pills.
Garland came on board to play Helen Lawson, an ageing star with an acrimonious, competitive relationship with O’Hara. She was fired shortly afterwards, replaced by Susan Hayward, after erratic behaviour on set. You can find traces online of her presence on the film, including footage of wardrobe tests, of a paper-thin Garland, an elegant husk, trying out everything from a red minidress to a patterned trouser suit.
Duke, who said she found Garland funny and charming, blamed the director, Mark Robson, for treating Garland badly and putting her in situations that made her vulnerable. Once again Duke continues the narrative of renewal and resourcefulness, the comeback cycle. After Garland was fired, Duke recalled what came next: “Six months later, she’s opening at the Palace, I went to opening night, and out she came in her suit from Valley of the Dolls.”
More than two dozen biographies have been written about Garland but she has been portrayed on screen only a few times. In Rainbow, a 1978 biopic that took her as far as the making of The Wizard of Oz, Andrea McArdle portrays the young Garland as a victim of the studio system.
In Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, a two-part TV biopic from 2001, Tammy Blanchard plays the adolescent Judy and Davis the adult: both won Emmys for their performances. Davis gives an uncanny, intense sense of Garland. In the two-part miniseries Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door (2015), Garland (played by Thornton) is a supporting character with a significant role to play in Allen’s life as his patron and mother-in-law.
There was to have been a big-screen biopic a few years ago. In 2009, producer Harvey Weinstein acquired the rights to Clarke’s biography, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland.
He announced that Anne Hathaway was to be the leading lady but the project bubbled along for several years before lapsing.
There have been films that pay tribute to those who channel Garland. They include Little Voice (1998) in which Jane Horrocks plays a reclusive young woman with a talent for imitating celebrated singers, Garland among them. The 1977 movie Outrageous! starred Craig Russell as an aspiring performer, a would-be female impersonator who needed encouragement to follow his dream: when he finally hits the stage and proves a hit, it’s a Garland number he turns to for an encore.
It is on stage — on stages large and small — where we have seen versions and visions of Garland most often. That’s where Amphlett played Garland, in two versions of another Allen biographical portrait, the musical The Boy From Oz: one was in the theatre, one was an arena version, with Hugh Jackman as Allen.
Robyn Archer, in a famous cabaret show from the 1980s, A Star is Torn, referenced Garland’s most famous role in its title, and incarnated a dozen women, from Bessie Smith and Garland to Edith Piaf and Karen Carpenter, whose lives and songs provided vivid examples of suffering and power.
An intriguing channeller has been Grande, an American pop singer with a prodigious voice who used to do YouTube videos in her bedroom. Several years ago her repertoire of deft imitations included an excerpt of the young Judy’s early signature numbers, Dear Mr Gable.
In 2016 she played Judy once more in an unaired Saturday Night Live sketch that imagined Judy in 1961, appearing in a Roger Corman space movie called Up We Go in Our Fantastic Rocket. Grande dons a black curly wing to play Captain Judy Garland, a charismatic, self-absorbed star who saves the world from alien invasion.
Others have imagined her as a kind of saviour. In 2006 Wainwright performed a song-by-song version, down to echoes of her patter, of one of Garland’s most celebrated and successful performances from 1961, at Carnegie Hall, whose live recording won her four Grammys. His homage, Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, has taken on the status of institution; in 2016, 10 years after the original performance, he did an anniversary show. Once again it was a sense of authenticity that drew him to this performance; he said that it seemed to offer hope at a dark time. Garland was someone he felt he needed to exorcise, someone haunted by the demands of her own voice but who also offers a redemptive power.
Judy opens on October 10.