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Liza Minnelli

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Liza Minnelli.
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Liza Minnelli.

Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946 in Los Angeles, California) is an Academy Award-winning American actress and singer. She is the daughter of legendary entertainer Judy Garland and her second husband, acclaimed film director Vincente Minnelli.

Contents

Early career

Minnelli's first film appearance was at the age of three in the final scene of the 1949 musical In the Good Old Summertime, starring her mother and Van Johnson.

Minnelli started performing at age 16, in 1963, in an Off-Broadway revival of the musical Best Foot Forward, for which she received good notices. The next year, her mother invited Minnelli to perform with her at the London Palladium. The audience loved her, launching her musical career. She returned to Broadway at 19, and won a 1965 Tony Award for Flora the Red Menace. Minnelli would also receive Tony Awards for The Act in 1978 and a special Tony in 1974. She was nominated in 1984 for [The Rink] but lost to her costar, Chita Rivera.

Film and television

The film The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), in which Minnelli starred as a love-seeking teenage misfit, garnered the young actress her first Academy Award nomination. In 1972, Minnelli won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Sally Bowles in the movie version of Cabaret.

Among many coveted awards, Miss Minnelli won an Emmy Award for the 1972 TV special Liza with a Z, a 1990 Grammy Legend Award, and Golden Globe Awards for both Cabaret and the TV movie A Time to Live.

Minnelli, a Triple Crown Winner (having won Oscar, Tony and Emmy), has the distinction of being one of the few Academy Award winners whose parents are both Academy Award nominees.

Minnelli, like her mother, is known for her powerful, belting vocal style, as in her trademark songs "Cabaret" and "Theme from New York, New York". Minnelli's original version of the latter, for the film in which she was a co-star with Robert DeNiro, preceded Frank Sinatra's successful cover version (for his Trilogy album), by two years.

Later career

After her performance as leading lady to Dudley Moore in 1981's Arthur, Minnelli made fewer, and fewer successful, film appearances.

She returned to Broadway in 1997, taking over the title role in the musical Victor/Victoria, replacing Julie Andrews. In his review, New York Times critic Ben Brantley commented, "her every stage appearance is perceived as a victory of show-business stamina over psychic frailty... She asks for love so nakedly and earnestly, it seems downright vicious not to respond."

In 2002, Miss Minnelli married David Gest in a spectacularly lavish ceremony in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, but the union ended when she filed for divorce the following year.

In 2004 and 2005 she appeared as a recurring character on the critically acclaimed TV sitcom Arrested Development as Lucille Austero, the lover of sexually and socially awkward Buster Bluth and also the lover of Buster's brother GOB Bluth.

On January 1, 2006, she sang "New York, New York" at the second inauguration of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Other famous performances were at the 1978 Studio 54 party honoring New York City's revival, at which a guest was Mayor Ed Koch; the reopening of the Statue of Liberty on July 4, 1986; and at a 2001 New York Mets baseball game that was the metro area's first major sporting event after the September 11 attacks.

At the age of 60, for the "Macy's 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular" televised live, and nationally on NBC on July 4, 2006, gave a remarkable performance of "New York, New York", that was evocative of the singer at her peak.

Marriages and personal life

Minnelli has been married (and divorced) four times; her husbands have been: In addition to bringing her widespread critical acclaim, Minnelli's work in Cabaret also did much to cement her popular image, from the black helmet of hair and extravagant eyelashes that have remained her visual trademark to the perception among many that she shares Sally Bowles's combination of fragility and toughness, her hunger for affection, and her heedless detachment from the ordinary. Her well-publicized struggles with substance abuse have made it inevitable that there be comparisons to her mother's stormy career. The reappearance, first at film festivals in 2005 and subsequently on DVD, of Liza with a Z, combined with her resurgent concert schedule, has served as a reminder that, as she enters her sixties, Minnelli remains both a link to the traditions of show-business past and a vibrant performer in her own right.

According to her half-sister Lorna Luft's 1998 book, Me and My Shadows: Living with the Legacy of Judy Garland, Minnelli suffered a devastating miscarriage during her marriage to Jack Haley, Jr., losing a little girl at five months pregnant. She never had a child biologically, and it is widely accepted that Minnelli could not carry a child to term.

Filmography

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Music

Albums

Hit Singles

Television work

Stage productions

Trivia

Liza Minnelli, in 1993, visiting the tomb of Eva Perón. In the early 1980s, Minnelli was in the running for the role of Evita.
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Liza Minnelli, in 1993, visiting the tomb of Eva Perón. In the early 1980s, Minnelli was in the running for the role of Evita.

See also

References

 

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