 Although singer-actress
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,
Liza 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.
Liza 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.
Liza 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,
Liza 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.
Liza 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.
Liza 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.
Liza 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.
Liza 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,
Liza 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
Liza 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,
Liza 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.
Liza 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
new husband, David Gest. J Records released an album drawn from the Beacon
performances, Liza's Back, in October. A proposed reality TV series featuring
her and Gest for the cable network VH1 was scuttled at the last moment in early
2003 amid mutual recriminations, and
Liza Minnelli embarked on a national tour. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Contact Grabow for more information or to book
Liza Minnelli for your next corporate or private event.
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