Judy Garland

Judy Garland is hailed as the Greatest Entertainer of all time. Broadway World Cabaret looks at ten videos that show why she was, and ten videos that show ...

But my favorite Judy Garland performance is actually from I Could Go On Singing and it's the "By Myself" in the red dress because it's so raw and angry and it's a great thing to watch whenever you're having an emotion, although whenever I'm in a bad mood, I listen to "Gotta Have Me Go With You" because it makes me happy. "My favorite Judy Garland song, since I'm twelve years old, is "It Never Was You" and it was off of an album my parents gave me for Christmas, I didn't see the movie I Could Go On Singing until I was in my twenties. Today is the day that Judy Garland would have turned one hundred years old. In the quiet of the dimming day, my husband said, into the darkness, "What's your favorite Judy Garland song?" No. He wanted to know what my favorite Judy Garland song is. To celebrate the occasion, I have collected ten of my personal favorite Judy Garland performances, and ten of my personal favorite covers of Judy Garland songs. I knew what my gut response was but I had to really stop and think about it for a few minutes, reason it out, and make the best and most authentic answer possible because, even though this was just an innocuous moment out of the week, I wanted to be authentic. It isn't possible because there is a different Judy Garland song available for every occasion, for every emotion, for every experience. My favorite Judy Garland song? Couldn't I just choose which of my children is my favorite? How about picking a favorite day, out of my whole life, instead? I was ready for sleep.

Judy Garland, who would have turned 100 on Friday (June 10), had both historic wins and perplexing losses at awards shows.

Garland had four other songs on the list – “The Man That Got Away” (No. 11) from A Star Is Born, “The Trolley Song” (No. 26) and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (No. 76),” both from Meet Me in St. Louis, and “Get Happy” (No. 61), from Summer Stock. Gene Kelly was the only other performer with five songs on the list. Five more Garland recordings have since also been voted into the Hall – “(Dear Mr. Gable) You Made Me Love You,” “For Me and My Gal” (a collab with Gene Kelly), Judy at Carnegie Hall and the soundtracks to Meet Me in St. Louis and The Wizard of Oz. “Over the Rainbow” topped AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs, a list of the top 100 songs in American film in the 20th century The list was created by a panel of jurors selected by AFI, who voted from a list of 400 nominated songs. And is also representative of the fact that her legacy of unique exceptionalism and inclusivity and generosity of spirit, it transcends any one artistic achievement.” Gene Kelly also had three films on the list, though not all of his were in the top 10. Garland and Barbra Streisand, who was a guest star on the show, were both nominated for outstanding performance in a variety or musical program or series. In a perfect world, the legendary performer and the future legend would have tied for the award. (Dinah Shore sang the song at the Oscars.) This was the second song that Garland introduced in a film to win the Oscar. She was the first woman to introduce two Oscar-winning songs. “The last year has been such a wonderful year for me and I have so many people to thank.” Received a third Emmy nod for her weekly series, also titled The Judy Garland Show, which had a troubled, six-month run in 1963-64. In her absence, Rosemary Clooney sang “The Man That Got Away.” … Miss Garland, you were certainly among the heroes who unite and define us, and this is certainly for you.”

Must-see Judy Garland films if you really want to know who she was and how her private life touched her performances.

From her earliest days at MGM to The Judy Garland Show, the powerhouse entertainer was singular and enduring.

It's been called a passing of the torch, as it were, from one (gay) icon to the next, and everything about it is perfect. Garland exclaims while bowling over with laughter) and Garland's hep vibrato over "Honeysuckle Rose." When they come together in unison for a spirited rendition of Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's standard "Love," the energy is so high it can hardly be contained. "Over the Rainbow" has never sounded more achingly wistful than it does here; "The Man That Got Away" somehow feels even bigger and more unstoppable than it did in A Star Is Born. You will listen once, and then, surely, you'll want to listen again, and again. (Why yes, this is quite literally a barnyard musical.) Gene Kelly is her co-star, and Garland holds her own alongside him on the dance floor. Versions of A Star Is Born have come before and after Garland's turn, but this remains the definitive iteration, perhaps because it so closely parallels aspects of its star's life. (This occurs on Easter Sunday, hence the title.) Hoping to make Nadine jealous, he hires chorus girl Hannah Brown (Garland) and vows to turn her into a star. The director's admiration of Garland is evident in the way he frames her soft, ethereal close-ups. It was extremely rare for a Garland performance not to call upon her to belt at least one tune, but she could sell a straight performance just as well as she could a song. Garland plays Esther Smith, one of the eldest daughters in a prominent family living in St. Louis at the beginning of the 20th century. But the powerhouse entertainer born Frances Ethel Gumm famously (and luckily, for us) had so much more to give audiences over the course of her relatively short and tumultuous life. Movie retrospectives are happening, and YouTube has a plethora of clips to comb through; here's a guide to help jumpstart you on your journey beyond the yellow brick road. It's safe to say The Wizard of Oz has been an entry point to Judy Garland for many generations.

To be clear, Garland's drug addiction was horrific, but it was also pretty impressive.

Sadly, it all caught up to Garland in 1969, when she was found dead of what was ruled an “incautious self-overdosage” with the equivalent of 10 Seconals in her system, ingested over the course of several hours. That might seem like a lot of drugs to forget you took, but the woman was up to 40 pills a day. It’s hard to know what to do in that situation, whether to look away or simply accept the good fortune of a free Judy Garland show and applaud, but it seems the men did the latter. The manager of her comeback tour in the early ‘60s also wrote that one night, as Garland stumbled to bed, she face-planted into a glass coffee table. When not even her mobile pharmaceutical gang could satisfy her, Garland began making semi-frequent stops at the Kelly residence, which was halfway between her own home and the studio, to “use the bathroom,” which Kelly’s wife soon realized was code for “steal just enough of their sleeping pills to put them in a newfangled Gaslight situation.” Contrary to the innocent persona she played onscreen, Garland had friends-with-benefits relationships with her fellow teen idols from the time she was 15.

In adulthood, she'd garner Oscar nominations and Grammy wins, and shine in performances alongside other contemporary greats, like Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis, ...

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June 10, 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Judy Garland, one of the ...

He got her “like seven or eight pills” of Seconal, taken from a naval hospital and thus with a military label on the bottle. JUDY, for those wondering, combines scents of the Judy Garland rose with dark orchid, coriander, and (per the official press release) “a medley of sultry Gourmand and spice notes.” One of the pairs of ruby slippers worn by Garland ( who wore a size five shoe) during the filming of The Wizard of Oz was stolen from Grand Rapids, Minnesota’s Judy Garland Museum in 2005. Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, would later recall that Kennedy would always ask Garland to sing a few bars of “Over the Rainbow” to end their calls. At 17 years old, and already one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, Garland had her first serious romantic relationship with 29-year-old musician/bandleader Artie Shaw. Garland’s heart was broken when she read in the morning paper that Shaw had eloped with her friend—and future movie star— Lana Turner. To make the situation even worse, Shaw defended himself to Garland by denying that their relationship had ever been a romantic one. After Garland’s 1969 death, Lara recalled, “I was stationed in Washington, D.C., and the newspaper I saw had a piece that said that by the bedside was found a military-grade prescription of Seconal.” Decades later, Lara would use his reality TV appearance to tell the story for the first time. Garland’s public image doesn’t exactly mesh with the slick, cool vibe exuded by the Rat Pack—and yet, she was one of its original members. Though Garland would eventually develop a reputation for being unreliable, she worked her whole life—starting at the age of 2 years old, when Garland (then “Frances Gumm”) made her stage debut singing at the movie house owned by her father. An oft-repeated—but never confirmed—legend about Garland is that her death played a role in sparking the Stonewall riots, as her funeral had taken place just one day before. Trans activist Sylvia Rivera, a key figure in the early gay rights movement, later said of the hours before the police raid that led to the Stonewall riots: “You could actually feel it in the air. Associate producer Arthur Freed threatened to quit if it wasn’t put back in, and Mayer folded, saying: “Let the boys have the damn song. In honor of Dorothy Gale herself, here are 10 facts about about the late actress, singer, gay icon, and all-around legend.

Garland was born in Grand Rapids back in 1922. She went on to mega stardom, starring in movies like “The Wizard of Oz” and “A Star is Born.” RELATED: Grand ...

Minnelli and Luft say the fragrance was based on what their mother would have worn herself. She went on to mega stardom, starring in movies like “The Wizard of Oz” and “A Star is Born.” She had success on the big screen, but she also struggled with depression and addiction.

On what would have been the screen icon's 100th birthday, Colin Fleming looks back on an artist that was so much more than Dorothy from 'The Wizard of Oz.'

I hear this, and I think we need to do a better job collectively of listening to Garland, and opening ourselves up to all that she was and remains in her art across the mediums. Prepare yourself, and find your way to Judy Garland. That’s the other side of the rainbow you want to get to. She’s harried by the stresses of life, her job, making ends meet, finding a way to catch her bus after her shift, and she agrees to let him give her a ride. The floor is hers, but the listener is caught up, and invested, in the concept of ours. She embodied “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” and to hear this record is to hear a form of vocal jazz in which the voice permeates the listener with the same efficacy of any trumpet solo Miles Davis ever fashioned. The ending is a gut-punch, and yet so triumphant. This is a Dickensian quality, and I think the more selfless an artist is, the more their work can do. There were a couple of guiding precepts: there’d be a twist at the end, which could be laughable, and the episodes would feature Hollywood stars cast against type. She has the little dog, she looks up to her uncles, but this is also a grown-up person on the inside, who is going where she needs to go, wicked witches be damned. Plenty will be made of The Wizard of Oz, which Garland famously starred in as a 17-year-old in 1939. In 1958, paired with the arranger Nelson Riddle—who’d worked with the likes of Sinatra, Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole—Garland cut Judy in Love. She went deep into the American Songbook, crafting an album that is itself a sustained hymn to the possibilities of song. You can help to teach it, but there’s only one way to master it, and that’s simply to have things that others don’t. But Garland was that rarest of singers whose technique was eclipsed by her emotional range, that quality within her that led to transcendent musical art.

It's the film in which Minnelli first unleashed the full force of his artistry—and he did so thanks to Garland's own dramatic power. Garland was born on June 10 ...

“The Clock” is a movie of the social construction of private life, of love and loss, of sex and death—of ineffable beauty and its inexorable connection to horror. “The Clock” feels like the closest thing to an erotic documentary that Hollywood could offer at the time of the Hays Code; the fact that it was released uncontested suggests the insignificance and feebleness of the code, and, even more, of directors who took its dictates as constraints on their art. As Joe, Walker has a nearly campy intensity that captures the inexpressible fear of war’s consequences at the root of the role—and that the script itself, by Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, catches. She builds the role with gestures that are choreographically etched and vocal inflections that, with their rhythm and pitch and emphases and space and silence of music, are themselves a kind of singing. In a directorial career that ran from 1942 to 1976, Minnelli was the poet of institutions, a forerunner in fiction of Frederick Wiseman, dramatizing the inner workings of theatres, schools, families, a mental hospital, the American West, and Hollywood itself. But, of course, the center of the movie, its very engine, is Garland. She invests Alice with a blend of determination and wariness, weary solitude and pent-up energy. Reportedly, Minnelli himself changed the script so that it opens on a teeming array of happenstance characters, strangers whom Joe encounters, from one to another, before he stumbles upon Alice (or vice versa): a shoemaker closing up shop, a conductor on the top of a double-decker bus, children in the park and the museum, waiters in restaurants or the many passersby who randomly intrude on personal moments and drive the couple into self-conscious silences, a milkman who gives the couple a lift on a joyful yet serious nighttime adventure, the chain of officials whose daily rounds and exceptional efforts are essential to the couple’s ultimate union. The movie is built around a Rube Goldberg-esque mechanism of fortuitous connections involving a series of coincidental meetings with strangers who play large or small roles in the life of the couple as the bonds of romance tighten and they rush toward a wartime marriage. Joe, who’s from a small town in Indiana, has never set foot in New York before, and overwhelmed by his first glimpse of the city, asks Alice to show him around. Garland was unhappy with the progress of the shoot and persuaded the film’s producer, Arthur Freed (the studio’s main musicals supervisor as well as a prominent lyricist, whose credits include the song “Singin’ in the Rain”), to replace Zinnemann with Minnelli. She had already worked with Minnelli for the musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and he was also her romantic partner. Garland was born on June 10, 1922, and “The Clock,” shot in late 1944, when Garland was twenty-two, is the first movie in which she starred but didn’t sing. She had lobbied her bosses at M-G-M for a dramatic, nonsinging role, and “The Clock” went into production under the direction of Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jewish émigré who was something of a specialist in social-realistic dramas.

JUDY GARLAND: (As Dorothy Gale) Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. MONDELLO: When we finally got a color TV, it was different but only slightly ...

Five silent versions of "The Wizard Of Oz" dating back to 1910 don't add much, even though one stars Oliver Hardy, the big half of Laurel and Hardy. If those, why not shows that came later? The point was to make the film not better but just the way we think we remember it. (Crying) I'm frightened. So you can sort of see how it might have looked and also see the guys inside the trees. GARLAND: (As Dorothy Gale, singing) Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly. What we see on the DVD are composer Harold Arlen's home movies, shot from behind one of Oz's apple-throwing trees. Birds fly over the rainbow. The film might not have recovered. MONDELLO: I have since seen "The Wizard Of Oz" on much better TV sets and also on the big screen, at a theater where our local friends of Dorothy greeted Glinda's arrival in her pink bubble by releasing pink helium balloons that floated to the ceiling. When the film was restored for the DVD, the negatives were realigned digitally. BOB MONDELLO: The first few times I saw "The Wizard Of Oz," my family still had a black-and-white TV set. MONDELLO: When we finally got a color TV, it was different but only slightly.

Judy Garland, who helped lift America's spirits during the later stages of the Depression in the 1930s and continued to turn in strong performances into the ...

They were captivated by her charm and ability to seemingly live the songs that she sang. Garland’s addiction, which began as a child when her mother gave her stimulants to perform and depressants to rest. She was one the brightest stars during Hollywood’s Golden Era, but a tragic one as well.

THOMPSON: But Judy Garland was way more than her "Wizard Of Oz" performance. Aisha Harris is a co-host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. She's a longtime ...

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