The biopic Liza Minnelli wanted nothing to do with: “Reports to the contrary are 100% fiction”
Whenever a biopic is announced, the same debates quickly follow. The default reaction is often scepticism, with many assuming the film will fall short. It is genuinely rare for a movie about a real person to be both good and truly capture the complexity of its subject.
There is also the ethical debate about whether such films are right or wrong, especially when they attempt to bring someone like Judy Garland back to life on screen. So when Judy was first announced, the project faced the same scrutiny. Although production began in 2018, the story’s origins go back much further, to the 2005 stage play End of the Rainbow, which focused on the final months of Garland’s life.
Devastatingly, the end of Garland’s life was just as tragic as so much of the rest of it. As a young star, she was the epitome of a golden age Hollywood figure, but also the poster child for how studios mistreated their actors. While still only a teenager on the set of The Wizard of Oz, Garland was placed on an intense diet, propped up by drugs to get her through a long filming schedule, cruelly treated by the people in charge, and even assaulted by cast members.
From there, a lifelong struggle with her mental health and addiction began, which led to a career of intense ups and downs, and by the time she was in her mid-to-late 40s, Garland found herself in London performing in a play as a last-ditch effort to revive her career and bring in some much-needed cash. At the same time, she was still struggling greatly with her health and addictions, as well as still enduring mistreatment in relationships. In the end, she died at 47 of an accidental overdose. She hadn’t specifically meant to kill herself, but also such a long addiction, she already was, slowly anyway.
It was devastating for her fans, her friends, but mostly for her family, including her daughter, Liza Minnelli, so when people talk about biopics, it’s those surviving loved ones that need to be considered, but often aren’t.
It must have been hard enough to manage the grief of her mother’s death without then having to face up to a culture desperate to replay it. For Minnelli, there was no escaping the rehashing of her mother’s trauma, and by 2019, she’d completely had enough. When stories began circling claiming that she’d met with Renee Zellweger, who was playing her mother in Judy, she shut it all down swiftly.
“I have never met nor spoken to Renee Zellweger,” she said, before making it clear, “I don’t know how these stories get started, but I do not approve nor sanction the upcoming film about Judy Garland in any way.”
She wanted absolutely nothing to do with it, and in an ideal world, she didn’t want it to happen at all, adding to be vehemently clear, “Any reports to the contrary are 100% fiction”.
But of course, it happened anyway, adding to the conversation of the morality or ethics of biopics when the family are calling out for peace from their own pain rather than having it splashed on cinema screens again.
