Liza Minnelli, Still Just Fabulous at 80

by Anthony Grant

In February 2006, I saw Liza Minnelli in concert in Brussels. The invasion of Iraq was still fresh, and anti-American sentiment ran high across Europe. But when Minnelli, not yet 60, belted out “New York, New York” to a packed house at the city’s venerable Palais des Beaux-Arts, she brought a rapturous audience to its feet.

The entertainment legend is a longtime supplier of America’s good stuff, and that cold night in Brussels she practically brought down the house.

In her new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Minnelli looks back on a life of standing ovations and hard-won comebacks, and she tells it with a showstopper’s timing. At  Just Fabulous in Palm Springs, signed copies of the book sold out within 30 minutes. But worry not, more are on the way.

It’s a fitting title for a woman who has been entertaining audiences since before she could vote. Born March 12, 1946, in Los Angeles, Liza May Minnelli arrived as the daughter of two Hollywood royals: Judy Garland, the voice behind “Over the Rainbow,” and director Vincente Minnelli, the man who gave the studio musical its lush, Technicolor soul. Growing up in that shadow could have crushed a lesser talent. Instead, Minnelli made it her launching pad.

She was a Broadway star by 19, winning a Tony Award for Flora the Red Menace in 1965, at the time the youngest woman ever to take the prize for best actress in a musical. Then came the role that defined her. In Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), Minnelli’s Sally Bowles, a reckless, heartbreaking nightclub singer dancing at the edge of Weimar Berlin’s collapse, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The performance remains a benchmark for musical film, and the title number still stops hearts.

The accolades kept coming. She won an Emmy for her 1972 television special Liza with a Z, another Tony for The Act in 1978, and a Grammy Legend Award. She filled Carnegie Hall and the Radio City Music Hall stage. She charmed a new generation as the endearing Lillian in Arthur (1981), recorded with the Pet Shop Boys, and returned for a memorable stint on Arrested Development. Along the way came public struggles, including addiction, surgeries and serious illness, and each time she came back to the stage. As her memoir makes clear, the comebacks were as much a part of the act as the sequins.

Which brings us to today’s crop of fame chasers. In an age when a million followers can be had for a viral dance, a staged feud or a well-lit selfie, Minnelli’s career is a reminder of what celebrity once meant: years of rehearsal, of voice and footwork honed night after night before live audiences who could not be fooled. She did not inherit a gift so much as earn it, and she kept earning it for six decades. Fame is easy to chase and easy to lose. Talent, as a packed house in cold Brussels once reminded me, is what makes people rise to their feet and thirst for  more—juicy memoirs included.