| Liza
Minnelli can count Academy
Award-winning film roles, Tony
Award-winning musical theater
performances, Emmy Award-winning
television specials, and gold-selling
records among her accomplishments, she
is primarily a concert performer whose
career has been defined by a series of
stage acts dating back to her nightclub
debut in 1965. Her best work in film, in
the musical theater, and on television
has taken advantage of and grown out of
her reputation as a live performer, and
many of the albums she has released
under her own name are concert
recordings. (She has also appeared on
numerous soundtracks and cast albums.)
Since she began performing in the early
'60s, Minnelli has displayed an
energetic style that combines technical
precision with warmth and enthusiasm,
allowing her to transcend the contrary
trends in popular music over the course
of her career and maintain her status as
a major star.
Minnelli is the daughter of film
director Vincente Minnelli and
actress-singer Judy Garland. As such,
her show business career began early,
when she was cast as a baby in the 1949
film In the Good Old Summertime starring
her mother and directed by her father.
When she was five, her parents divorced,
agreeing on joint custody, and she
shuttled between them for the rest of
her childhood, living alternately in
Hollywood, where her father continued to
direct movies, and on the road with her
mother, who toured the world as a
concert performer. She first performed
on-stage with her mother at the age of
ten and also made occasional appearances
on television as a child. Due to her
mother's peripatetic career, she
attended many different schools. By her
teens, she had decided she wanted to
pursue a career as an entertainer, and
in 1961 she passed the audition for
admittance to the New York High School
for the Performing Arts, though,
typically, she did not stay there long.
In 1962, she recorded the voice of
Dorothy, the part played by her mother
in the film The Wizard of Oz, for an
animated sequel called Journey Back to
Oz that was shelved until 1974, when it
resulted in a soundtrack album on RFO
Records called The Return to Oz. Later
in 1962, following a brief attendance at
the Sorbonne in Paris, she abandoned
formal education to try to become an
actress in New York. She made her
professional debut at 17 in an
off-Broadway revival of the 1941 musical
Best Foot Forward, which opened April 2,
1963. It ran 244 performances, and
Cadence Records released a cast album
that marked her recording debut.
Minnelli sang with her mother on two
episodes of the television series The
Judy Garland Show in November and
December 1963, and the performances have
turned up on several Garland albums. In
1964, Minnelli gained experience in
touring companies of the musicals
Carnival! and The Fantasticks, and she
signed a recording contract with
Capitol, which released her debut LP,
Liza! Liza!, in the fall. The album
reached the Billboard charts, but its
successors, It Amazes Me (June 1965) and
There Is a Time (December 1966), did
not. In November 1964, she was co-billed
with her mother at the London Palladium,
and their appearance was recorded for a
1965 Capitol album, Live at the London
Palladium, that reached the Top 100.
Minnelli was given her first starring
role in a Broadway musical at the age of
19 with Flora, the Red Menace, featuring
a score by composer John Kander and
lyricist Fred Ebb, that opened on May
11, 1965, but closed after only 87
performances. Despite its failure, she
became the youngest woman ever to win a
Tony Award for Best Actress in a
Musical. The resulting cast album,
released on RCA Victor Records, reached
the charts. She formed a lasting
association with Kander & Ebb, who
frequently wrote for her from then on.
On September 14, 1965, she made her
nightclub debut at the Shoreham Hotel in
Washington, D.C., in an act written by
Ebb. From there, she went on to Las
Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and other
stops on her first tour. For the rest of
her career, her work in clubs, theaters,
concert halls, hotels, and casinos would
be a constant, with other activities
fitted in around it. On November 28,
1965, she starred in the television
musical The Dangerous Christmas of Red
Riding Hood, featuring songs by Jule
Styne and Robert Merrill. A soundtrack
album was released on ABC Records in
January 1966.
Minnelli performed in prestigious
venues such as the Persian Room of the
Plaza Hotel in New York and the Talk of
the Town nightclub in London during
1966. On March 3, 1967, she married
singer/songwriter Peter Allen. They
divorced on July 24, 1974. She was also
married to movie producer Jack Haley Jr.
(1974-1979), stage manager Mark Gero
(1979-1992), and concert promoter David
Gest (on March 16, 2002). She turned to
screen acting with a featured role in
the drama Charlie Bubbles, which was
released in February 1968. Her first
starring role in a movie came with the
drama The Sterile Cuckoo, which was
released in October 1969 and brought her
an Academy Award nomination for best
actress. Meanwhile, as a recording
artist she had switched from Capitol to
A&M Records, which released her albums
Liza Minnelli (May 1968), Come Saturday
Morning (April 1970, named after the
theme song from The Sterile Cuckoo), New
Feelin' (November 1970), and Live at the
Olympia in Paris (July 1972), of which
only New Feelin' reached the charts.
Minnelli continued to work steadily
in the early '70s, headlining her first
television special on June 29, 1970, and
starring in the film Tell Me That You
Love Me, Junie Moon, released that July.
But her career really took off in 1972.
The year marked her starring role in the
film adaptation of Kander & Ebb's
musical Cabaret, directed by Bob Fosse,
which was released in February and
became a major hit. The soundtrack
album, released by ABC Records, went
gold, and she won the Academy Award for
best actress. She again teamed with
Kander, Ebb, and Fosse for her next
television special, a taped version of
her live show dubbed Liza With a "Z" and
broadcast September 10. It won the Emmy
Award for Outstanding Variety/Music
Program, and Columbia Records'
soundtrack LP reached the Top 20 and
went gold. The album marked the
beginning of her new record contract
with Columbia, and she followed with an
album of contemporary songs, Liza
Minnelli, the Singer, which reached the
Top 40 in 1973.
Minnelli did not immediately follow
up on her film success, but instead
continued to tour with her live act. Her
sold-out three-week appearance at the
Winter Garden on Broadway in January
1974 was recorded for the Columbia album
Live at the Winter Garden and earned her
a special Tony Award. She finally
returned to filmmaking in 1975, shooting
Lucky Lady (December 1975) and A Matter
of Time (October 1976), the latter
directed by her father; neither was
well-received. In between the two, she
filled in for an ailing Gwen Verdon in
the recently opened Broadway musical
Chicago (directed by Fosse, with music
by Kander & Ebb) for several weeks in
the summer of 1975, and Columbia
released a single of her recording of
"All That Jazz" from the score.
In June 1977, Minnelli co-starred
with Robert DeNiro in Martin Scorsese's
film musical New York, New York, about
the star-crossed romance between a band
singer-turned-Hollywood-star and a jazz
musician in the 1940s and '50s. Kander &
Ebb wrote the period-style music, and
the soundtrack album reached the Top 50.
The lengthy, big-budget movie itself was
not a financial success, but the title
song went on to become a standard after
it was recorded by Frank Sinatra, though
it remained a signature song for
Minnelli. She next made a disco-styled
album, Tropical Nights, for Columbia,
then teamed again with Scorsese, who
directed her in the Broadway musical The
Act, featuring songs by Kander & Ebb. It
opened on October 29, 1977, and ran 233
performances, winning her a third Tony
Award. The cast album was released on
DRG Records.
In the late '70s, Minnelli returned
to concert work primarily, as her
recording contract had lapsed and her
string of unsuccessful films had hurt
her movie career. Such setbacks could
not keep her from selling out 11
consecutive nights at Carnegie Hall in
September 1979, a record for the venue.
In July 1981, she appeared in the
successful film comedy Arthur, but her
focus remained on concertizing, as she
toured around the world in the early
'80s. She co-starred with Chita Rivera
in the Broadway musical The Rink, a
Kander & Ebb effort that opened February
9, 1984, produced a cast album on
Polydor Records, and ran 204
performances. She left the show in July
1984 to overcome substance abuse at the
Betty Ford Clinic. By June 1985, she was
back to touring. On October 28, 1985,
she starred in the television movie A
Time to Live, a drama. She won a Golden
Globe Award for her performance.
Minnelli continued to perform
internationally in the mid-'80s. Her
record-breaking three-week stand at
Carnegie Hall in the spring of 1987,
which launched a national tour, was
taped for her first album in ten years,
Liza Minnelli at Carnegie Hall, released
by Telarc that September; it made the
charts. In 1988, she appeared in two
films, Rent-a-Cop and Arthur 2: On the
Rocks. She also starred in another TV
movie, Sam Found Out: A Triple Play, on
June 7 and substituted for an ailing
Dean Martin on a September concert tour
with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.,
that later moved on to Europe and Asia
and culminated in a performance
broadcast on cable television. She
surprised fans by collaborating with the
Pet Shop Boys on a dance-music
arrangement of Stephen Sondheim's
"Losing My Mind," which became a Top Ten
hit in the U.K. upon its release by Epic
Records in the spring of 1989 and placed
in the dance charts in the U.S. (as did
its B-side, "Love Pains"). This prefaced
a full-length album, Results, released
in September, that made the Top Ten in
England and charted in America. In
September 1991, she appeared in the film
musical Stepping Out and on the
soundtrack album released by Milan
Records.
Still, concert performing remained
her primary means of expression, and her
next album, released by Columbia Records
in connection with a video in late 1992,
was Live From Radio City Music Hall. She
appeared in the cable-television movie
Parallel Lives on August 14, 1994. Hip
replacement surgery in December 1994
only interrupted her road work briefly;
she was back on tour in March 1995.
Another TV movie, West Side Waltz, was
broadcast on November 23, 1995. In March
1996, Angel Records released Gently, an
album of traditional pop standards, and
she toured to support it. It charted
briefly and earned a Grammy nomination
for Best Traditional Pop Vocal
Performance. In January 1997, she
substituted for Julie Andrews in the
Broadway musical Victor/Victoria. Her
next stage act, launched with a
month-long run at the Palace Theater in
New York in December 1999, was called
Minnelli on Minnelli and focused on
songs featured in movie musicals
directed by her father. She recorded it
for an album released on Angel in
February 2000, but the subsequent
national tour was cut short in April
when she contracted double pneumonia. In
October, she fell ill with a
life-threatening attack of encephalitis.
During 2001, she recovered from the
illness and underwent a second hip
replacement operation, and in the spring
of 2002 she returned to live performing
with multiple shows at the Royal Albert
Hall in London and the Beacon Theater in
New York, produced and directed by her
then new husband, David Gest. J Records
released an album drawn from the Beacon
performances, Liza's Back, in October. |
