udy Garland was the greatest entertainer of
the 20th – of any – century. Her singing made
a direct assault on the heart that no one else
has matched. In a career spanning 45 of her
47 years, again and again her performances
transcended the apparent lightness of her
material, investing it with a depth of wit, intelligence and emotion
scarcely even imagined by its creators. From blue-gingham yearning
for elsewhere in The Wizard of Oz, to graceful and madly comic
hankerings for love and fame in Easter Parade, right through to her
second-act concert life, when she freely gave her entire self to
her audiences, then gave a bit more (‘Let’s stay all night and we’ll
sing ’em all!’), Garland’s ability to communicate sheer, undiluted
feeling never faltered.
Waves of joy and sorrow from your own past come over you in
vivid layers when you listen to Judy Garland: triumphs, mistakes,
loss, good trouble. There’s no prevarication. Everything’s an
exhilarating rite of passage, requiring celebration or mourning,
sometimes both at once. The enthralling anticipation as her voice
begins to soar makes me think of a record-player needle being
lowered onto life itself. In songs like ‘The Man that Got Away’, ‘Look
for the Silver Lining’ or ‘Me and My Shadow’, there’s an imperative
i n t i m a c y s o s t r o n g t h a t i t c a n b e h a r d t o s e e w h e r e h e r e m o t i o n s e n d
and yours begin.
Garland created a whole new theatrical idiom in which glamour
and frankness nudge and jostle unabashedly. The rapport she had
with her concert audiences remains unequalled. She frequently pro-
voked a kind of ecstatic collapse in the aisles, her voice undoing
people, seeking consolation even as it consoled. ‘Almost everyone
in the theatre was crying and for days
afterwards people around Broadway
talked as if they had beheld a mira-
cle,’ read Life magazine’s review of the
Palace concerts in 1951. ‘Frenzies ofexaltation,’ said The New York Times of t he 1961 Ca r neg ie Ha l l spec -
tacular, often termed the greatest night in showbusiness history.
Had the auditorium caught fire, the audience would have stayed and
perished, the critic from the Long Island Press claimed. The Hollywood
Reporter went a step further: ‘Her fellow pros have no rivalry... All
of them agree that she is the greatest.’
I was a sensitive child, awkward, brimming; the kind of little girl
who worried about that sad pile of abandoned items on the ledge by
the till at the supermarket check-out. Even now, I try to buy one of
these things if I can. It seemed all anyone ever said to me was: ‘You
c a n n o t k e e p o n s o w i t h t h e s e g r e a t c a s c a d e s o f e m o t i o n... Yo u h a ve
to toughen up or you’ll never have a happy life.’ Quite a hard thing to
hear when one is four or six. But how to bring it about? Nobody said.
Into this fragile world one day came the voice of Judy Garland.
At the cinema for the first time with my
mother, I listened, transfixed, as Dorothy
sang ‘Over the Rainbow’. I saw before me
someone whose feelings seemed to run as
high as my own. She wasn’t hiding it, she
wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed; instead,
she led with her powerful emotions as
though they were the best thing life con-
tains. I felt a flood of profound kinship,
rings of similarity, although of course I did
not have those words. Garland made me
think my highly emotional nature, which
I ’ d l e a r n t t o v i e w a s a n a f fl i c t i o n , m i g h t j u s t
be the making of me... I wanted to slip
right then inside the screen.
I watched and listened to her whenever I
could after that. Garland’s early perfor-
mances are so easy-seeming and natural.
She had ‘something of the forest’, accordingJ
Renée Zellweger as
Judy Garland in
the new filmPHOTOGRAPHS: SHUTTERSTOCK, GETTY IMAGES, BOB WILLOUGHBY/MPTVIMAGES/EYEVINE, © DENNIS STOCK/MAGNUM PHOTOS, © PICTURELUX/EYEVINE