Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019 Page 43Bamigboye
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HOT young actors Sope Dirisu and Natey Jones
will join stars Wendell Pierce and Sharon D.
Clarke as Biff and Happy in the acclaimed Elliott &
Harper/Young Vic production of Arthur Miller’s
Death Of A Salesman, directed by Marianne
Elliott and Miranda Cromwell. The play runs at
the Piccadilly Theatre from October 24.ball cap, has tremendous power,
too. Her performance, as directed
by Rupert Goold (who runs Lon-
don’s Almeida Theatre) is one for
the ages. It’s a tour de force of an
artist’s fragility. She laughed when
I wondered how she worked on the
singing. ‘Lots of classrooms in Los
Angeles, New York and London,’
was the reply.
Producer David Livingstone,
found footage and recordings of
Garland’s more difficult perform-
ances for her to study. ‘There were
moments when she wasn’t suc-
ceeding but they’re very rare,’ the
actress said. She added that even
when her career was in decline,
Garland’s voice was still amazing.
‘If you look back, you can see that
this was a time of fatigue. The
aim was to tell the story of awoman who was struggling in her
circumstances, towards the end of
her life.’
I visited the Judy set a couple of
times when Goold and his team at
Pathe UK and BBC Films took
over the Hackney Empire and rec-
reated The Talk Of The Town.
I was so hypnotised by Zell-
weger’s portrait of Garland that I
sat up in the circle for hours,
observing her and Goold working
together. ‘We met in London two
years ago and I trusted him imme-
diately,’ she told me of their rela-
tionship. ‘It was a different experi-
ence for me, working with a theatre
director. He pulls the emotion out
in different ways.’ Zellweger
acknowledged ‘there are certainthings about her (Garland’s) expe-
riences that I might understand.
The misconceptions about being a
public persona. I’ve had my share
of misrepresentation with the
Press,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘It
comes with the deal, doesn’t it?
‘You don’t always have the option
to stay down when things are diffi-
cult, because you have obligations.
You’ve got to perform, because
you’ve made a promise.
‘People are depending on you.
Stars, actors, singers are like eve-
rybody else. We all deal with this
stuff. It’s just a different experi-
ence, in that we deal with it pub-
licly.’ Garland’s difficulties were
highly visible during her time in
London. Some of Goold’s film isseen through the eyes of Rosalyn
Wilder, a young production assist-
ant (played by Jessie Buckley)
given the unenviable task of ensur-
ing the star made it to The Talk Of
The Town stage each night.
We also meet two of Garland’s
husbands — Sidney Luft (played
by Rufus Sewell) and Mickey
Deans (Finn Wittrock), both of
whom had an eye on what they
could get out of Judy, financially.
Zellweger’s about to go into full
Judy mode today with the picture
receiving its first screening at the
Telluride Film Festival, high up in
Colorado’s San Jose Mountains.
The whole town will be celebrat-
ing Zellweger — there was a late
night, open-air screening of BridgetJones’s Diary here on Wednesday
night, and there will be a tribute to
the star over the weekend.
Speaking of Bridget, I asked if
she was done with playing her. ‘It
would be a lot of fun to play her
again,’ she said. ‘I love her deeply.’
It brought to mind an incident
from the first time she played
Bridget. She’d just done a crazy
scene at Shepperton studios, in
which the hapless Jones was
required to look very dishevelled.
‘I looked a state; and then Judi
Dench walked into the loo. She was
filming Chocolat at the studio. She
took one look at me and said: “Are
you alright?!” then realised it was
the role, and we both collapsed. I’ve
never forgottenthat moment.’R
ENEE Zellweger would
often find herself on the
brink of tears when she
was preparing to portray
Judy Garland.
‘I’d listen to her music every day,’ she
told me. ‘I’d watch footage of her before I
went to bed. She was always there, always
present. I had to get myself into Judy’s
environment: her voice, her speech
patterns, the moments of vulnerability in
her life that make you cry.’
The Oscar-winning actress lived with
Garland in her head for two years in order
to play her in Judy, which opens here on
October 2. ‘I just dove into learning about
her,’ she said. ‘Spending time with all of
the information left — the recordings, the
video — so I could try to understand the
essence of who she was.
‘She was vulnerable, always hopeful.
Funny, naughty, smart. And I saw there
were a couple of hurdles that were just
too high for her,’ Zellweger said.
Although Judy focuses on Garland’s
troubled five-week engagement at
London’s glittering Talk Of The Town
in 1968, it also looks at the lifetime of ups-
and-downs that brought her to that point.
They included the studio movies she made
with Mickey Rooney when she was a teen
where she wasn’t allowed to eat or sleep
without strict supervision.
‘The cruel manipulation when she was a
kid. The unkind way they got around the
child labour laws. They fed her pills! She
was addicted her whole professional life. I
can’t imagine that she slept, ever. Imagine
how all those pills can affect a woman’s
chemistry,’ Zellweger mused as she shook
her head.O
NE scene shows her with two of
her children — Lorna and Joey
— being turned away from a Hol-
lywood hotel in the dead of night
because she lacked the funds to pay for
her usual room. ‘It’s a testament to her
raw talent: what she was able to achieve
under seemingly impossible circum-
stances,’ Zellweger said. ‘She had tremen-
dous power in that tiny frame.’
The woman sitting opposite me in jeans
and a T-shirt, hair tucked up under a base-Zellweger:
I’ve lived
as Judy
Garland for
two years
Pictures: DAVID HINDLEYIN AMERICA