Scarlett Johansson’s love affair with music goes beyond the song that makes her cry
Scarlett Johansson is one of those rare acting talents who will talk about how much they love music and can then actually back it up with not just knowledge but with her own, really not bad at all albums as well.
So aside from being the highest-grossing actor in history, when Zoe Saldaña doesn’t pop up with her projects, she can also do music, which would be annoying, but she seems properly sound, so it’s difficult to be annoyed at her.
Apparently, creative brains actually function completely differently to normal ones, the millions of tiny connections made are more random, leading to daydreaming and the forming of ideas, which may well explain why rather than just pushing other kids’ faces down in sand and stuff, Johansson at seven years old was begging her folks to take her to auditions so that she could be in plays and movies.
She also developed an early obsession with Judy Garland of The Wizard of Oz and A Star is Born fame, who is one of the more prominent actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but also a renowned musical talent. Like Johansson, she started out very young, at just two years old, in fact, when she appeared with her sisters in a vaudeville act, and while it would be another decade until she signed her first recording contract in 1935, from that point it didn’t take long until she was globally famous.
Just three years later, she was skipping down the Yellow Brick Road with a tin man, a scarecrow and a really quite annoying lion and into the history books. And five years after that, in 1944, she made another musical that, while not on the scale of Oz, was still a critical and commercial success, and had a huge influence on a young Johansson many years later.
Johansson told W magazine, “A movie that made a big impression on me, I would say, was Meet Me In St Louis with Judy Garland. I mean I watched that movie obsessively as a kid and I was completely enamoured with Judy Garland. I had a big imagination as a kid, and those movies made me nostalgic for a time I never lived in.”
Meet Me In St Louis was the story of one family at the turn of the century in a year leading up to the World’s Fair, held in Missouri, in 1904. It was immensely popular for the standard of singing from Garland and for the quality of the original songs written for the film, including the future classic ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. It was nominated for four Oscars, winning a ‘Juvenile Award’ for Margaret O’Brien, who was just six at the time.
But while Johansson loves that movie, it’s Garland’s most famous venture that has the most powerful emotional effect on her to this day, with the actor adding, “The Wizard of Oz, that movie makes me cry, [especially] when Judy Garland sings ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, that song makes me cry. Obviously, I’m a big Judy Garland fan.”
Johansson, like Garland, had had several decades of success in cinemas since first appearing in movies in the ‘90s, and her real breakthrough came with Lost in Translation back in 2003. Where she differs from her hero, however, is in the impact that her musical ventures made. Although critically acclaimed, her two albums, 2008’s Anywhere I Lay My Head and the following year’s Break Up, didn’t sell a huge amount, but she has continued to sing in films to great effect.
Garland, however, was a two-time Grammy Award-winning singer known as one of the finest of hers or any era, and ‘Over the Rainbow’ was named as the American Film Institute’s number one movie performance song of all time.
