Home Top

Tyler Perry shares touching video tribute he made for Bobbi Kristina Brown's funeral - featuring unseen personal snaps and set to the tune of her mother Whitney Houston's 'You Were Loved'
Boy, 10, suffers severe brain damage after 'he and his family were cleared to return to home following botched termite fumigation'
'I am sorry our league had to endure this': Tom Brady breaks silence and writes Facebook post about 'Deflategate' scandal
Al Roker's 'Wake Up With Al' Weather Channel show cancelled after stormy emails between him and boss
Broken bones, dislocated shoulders and cadets taken away in an ambulance: 30 West Point students injured as annual PILLOW FIGHT turns nasty
Tragedy as body of missing George Washington University student, 19, is recovered in South Africa after he disappeared while swimming five days ago
Drug-addict couple arrested after 'living in squalor with boy, 3, who cannot speak and girl, 1, who was born in a bathtub and never taken to hospital'
Why did Chrissie Hynde date one of the Hells Angels who raped her? She enraged feminists by blaming herself for the attack. But the full story's even more shocking
Police arrest man connected to home invader that was killed by 11-year-old boy who shot him dead with one bullet while home alone with his four-year-old sister
To save your marriage, UNFRIEND your partner on Facebook: Therapist warns that social media can be toxic to a relationship
Whole Foods' security guard is fired after 'slamming a customer into concrete pillars before choking him unconscious in bloody attack when he tried to pay with food stamps'
Conservative presidential candidates go to battle over religious rights of Kim Davis and blast judge for locking up any-gay marriage clerk
Attorney for jailed county clerk claims marriage licenses issued to gay couples without her signature are VOID - as he compares her to Martin Luther King Jr
Just desserts! Woman throws a tantrum in take-away restaurant and screams at staff over color of their peppers... but gets her comeuppance as she walks out
Woman arrested for smuggling cocaine in her BRA at Florida airport
Jim Parson's college friend who he thanked in 2010 Emmys speech is arrested for improper relationship with student
Migrants march into the night: Germany and Austria announce they WILL let refugees into their countries after thousands walk the 100 miles to the border in desperate bid to start a new life
Revealed: How the five wealthiest Gulf Nations have so far refused to take a single Syrian refugee
Humanity washed ashore: Outpouring of grief continues for Syrian toddler Aylan, three, after images of his dead body on a Turkish shoreline shocked the world
Is El Chapo hiding in Costa Rica? Net closes on the world's most wanted drug lord after his son forgets to switch off location data in Twitter picture
More than 100 students and teachers struck down by mystery illness at North Carolina high school
Two Rikers Island guards charged with beating an 18-year-old inmate with an IQ of 65 in a supply closet
Are these the worst behaved kids EVER? Reality series reveals children's most awful tantrums, fights and lies in home-video footage shot by horrified parents
UCSD Neurosurgeon accused of using marijuana while on the job

'My job now is to prove all my critics wrong!' On the eve of her UK concerts, and fresh out of rehab, Liza Minnelli comes out fighting

Published: 17:31 EST, 4 September 2015 | Updated: 23:33 EST, 4 September 2015

View
comments

Any worries about what version of Liza Minnelli I might meet today are dispelled by the relaxed, smiling woman in front of me.

After a bumpy six months she’s looking great. At the end of last year she sprained her back in dance rehearsals which led to an operation and then a course of pills to deal with the pain.

She’s the first to admit she has an addictive personality, and the medication combined with a renewed spell of drinking resulted in her spending several weeks in rehab in March and April. But they seem to have worked.

Scroll down for video

Liza has had a rocky year after spraining her ankle and the medication combined with a renewed spell of drinking resulted in her spending several weeks in rehab in March and April

It’s 46 years since Liza’s mother, Judy Garland, died from an accidental drug overdose in London at 47 and Liza has had her own dark chapters including a bout of viral encephalitis in 2000 caused by an infected mosquito bite.

Doctors told her she’d never talk or walk, let alone dance, again, that her career was over. But today it’s more than obvious that Liza with a Zee is a survivor with a capital S. ‘But I don’t think like that,’ she says. ‘Surviving is an instinct which means it just comes naturally. I don’t examine it. I just get right on and do it.’ She has no time for the tittle-tattle that’s followed her down the years either. ‘I’m still here. My job is to prove them wrong. And I’m not going anywhere.’

Liza’s former agent, Stevie Phillips, who was also Judy Garland’s minder in the 1960s, has recently written a memoir which trashes Garland, but is more carefully unpleasant about Liza as she’s still alive.

Liza with her mother Judy Garland in 1962

Phillips lists in detail Judy’s pill-popping, alcohol-soaked, attention-seeking stunts including setting fire to her own nightdress and rubbing the crushed glass from the mirror of her powder compact into her face.

She claims Garland was a drama queen who dragged her children – Liza and her younger half-sister, Lorna, and half-brother, Joey from her marriage to producer Sid Luft – around the world in her wake. Phillips paints Liza as a girl who at first wouldn’t take so much as an aspirin, but later followed her mother’s route into booze and drugs.

She seemed always to be on her way to a party, recalls Phillips, and would sometimes disappear for a week. There are tales of bed-hopping, including the time in Paris when ‘Charles Aznavour was occupying every minute of Li’s free time. I was told that Li and the French troubadour were a hot item. Li had no difficulty climbing into bed at the drop of a hello. Neither had Judy.’

There’s also a nasty anecdote about when she was recovering from her brush with encephalitis. Leaning on a walker and with slurred speech, she asked Phillips, whom she’d fired years earlier, for help to resume her career. Phillips declined, explaining that she hadn’t represented anyone for a long time.

‘As she turned to leave, I noticed that some department store’s plastic security tag was still attached to the printed chiffon blouse she wore,’ writes Phillips.

Unless she’s an even better actress than we think, Liza reacts with genuine surprise when I tell her about the book. She says she had no idea of its existence. ‘I never read any of that stuff,’ she says. ‘Because it might upset me.’ She says she learned this from her friend Elizabeth Taylor.

‘She told me she never read a single thing about herself, so I stopped too, right there and then, which meant there was never anything lousy going round in my brain. That was good advice.’

Might this not be the moment for Liza, 69, to write her autobiography and set the record straight? ‘I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to do it unless I’m really enthusiastic about it. Right now I’m too enthusiastic about so many other things. The way I see it, I’m at the bow of a boat moving ahead. All the nonsense behind me is the wake and I’m impervious to it as I plough on.’

Liza in her most famous role as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret

This month she’s performing two Evenings With… in the UK, so it seems superfluous to ask whether she’s slowing down. ‘Can you see me moving upstate and raising schnauzer dogs?’ she asks. She has three.

‘Performers like to perform. It’s what I do.’ She shrugs at the mention of her 70th birthday. ‘Listen, everyone ages but not everyone has to get old. I’ve never lost my curiosity and I think that keeps you young.’ She also does a dance class every day, not bad for someone who’s had two hip and one knee replacement operations.

‘On the top half I’m Dorothy [the part her mother played in The Wizard Of Oz]. On the bottom half I’m the Tin Man. When I walk through that metal detector at the airport, it’s like fireworks going off.’

For her UK shows she’ll be interviewed on stage before she performs. The first, at the London Palladium on 20 September, sees her in conversation with Sir Bruce Forsyth, a 90-minute chat that will include questions from the audience, the second in Sheffield is with DJ Mike Read. Liza won’t be vetting the questions.

On the top half I’m Dorothy. On the bottom half I’m the Tin Man

‘Absolutely not. They can ask me anything they want. I’ve always liked a live audience. I find it scary when there’s no audience – on TV, in films. There’s this woman singing in my head who wants to tell her own story. I was a teenager when I started singing and I wasn’t very good. That’s why I developed the trick of acting out the songs.

‘Momma always taught me: “Be the best version of yourself. Don’t be the second best version of somebody else.” I’ve always stuck to that. I performed with her – at the Palladium, for instance – and it was tough to keep up although I never tried to imitate her. She’d be pleased I’ve made a name for myself.’

She points out that children of famous parents very rarely have big careers in their own right. ‘There’s me and Michael Douglas,’ she says, and then she’s struggling. ‘Frank Sinatra Jr is a very nice guy,’ she adds, ‘but he’s got the same name as his father and he sings his dad’s songs. Not a good idea. If you’re going to swim in the same pond as your parents, you’ve got to do it in a completely different way or you’ll be in trouble.’

After four marriages, she’s currently single. ‘But who knows?’ she says. ‘I’m too busy, though, and anyway I’m in love with life at the moment. I’ve had a wonderful life.’ Judy was clearly a major influence on it, but people sometimes forget about her father, director Vincente Minnelli. ‘I was definitely a daddy’s girl but I adored my mother. I understood her and yes, I sometimes had to look after her but then she’d looked after me.’

Although she was raised in Los Angeles, she’s lived in New York for most of her adult life. Now she’s back in LA. ‘It was like coming home. There are so many memories there. We had Lana Turner for a neighbour on one side and Humphrey Bogart on the other. But that seemed perfectly normal to me.’

The first two visitors to her mother’s bedside when she’d given birth to Liza were Frank Sinatra and Noel Coward. ‘Honey,’ she says, ‘I’ve been famous since before I was born.’ Which, of course, has been both a blessing and a curse.

For details of Liza’s UK shows, visit roccobuonvinoproductions.com.