Liza Minnelli says Gene Hackman was “downright rude” to her on set of ‘Lucky Lady’
Liza Minnelli has opened up about her experience of working with the late Gene Hackman, who she described as being “downright rude”.
Minnelli has detailed the pitiful period, which occurred on the set of the 1975 movie Lucky Lady, in her new memoirs, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!
In the film, which also starred Burt Reynolds, Hackman was brought on board as a late replacement for George Segal, who dropped out at the last minute. Hackman was unconvinced, but eventually, the reported $1.25 million fee persuaded him to accept the project rather than director Stanley Donen’s vision.
During the shooting of the movie, which took place on a boat, Hackman spoke out about the conditions to the New York Times, frustratingly saying about below deck, “That’s the worst, because below it smells bad.”
Now, Minnelli has divulged about her bleak filming experience of Lucky Lady, writing in her new book, “I don’t like to whine, but Stanley (Donen) later shared publicly that Gene was very dismissive of me during the film.”
She added, “It’s hard to go to work when the chemistry is absent. I think it’s fair to say that Gene was downright rude.”
Despite the love-triangle film starring Hackman, Reynolds and Minnelli, three of the biggest stars of the era in Hollywood, it was a commercial and critical failure that damaged Donen’s career dramatically.
Minnelli isn’t the first of the film’s stars to have criticised Lucky Lady. In Reynolds’ book But Enough About Me, published in 2016, the now-deceased actor revealed the tensions that pervaded over the set, writing, “Gene Hackman is a good actor. He’s tough, and Liza is so boop oopy doop, it didn’t sit well with him. Every once in a while he’d go, ‘Liza, shut the fuck up!’ We’d all have to walk off the set until he cooled off. Gene’s not a bad guy, but he allowed Liza to distract him.”
He also said of Hackman’s behaviour, “Gene wasn’t the easiest to work with either. You’d do the rehearsal one way, and when you got to the take, he’d say, ‘You’re not gonna do it that way, are you?’ He’d do that to Liza, and she’d fall apart.”
Elsewhere in Minnelli’s new book, she revealed details of a cocaine-fuelled affair involving Martin Scorsese on the set of his 1977 movie New York New York.
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