Judy Garland

Anyone asking who was Judy Garland has to begin in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where she was born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10, 1922. Her parents, Frank and Ethel Gumm, were vaudeville performers who managed a local theater, and the youngest Gumm daughter first appeared on its stage before she was three years old, singing Jingle Bells alongside her two older sisters ^[1].

The family moved to Lancaster, California, in 1926, partly so the girls could pursue show business more seriously. Billed as The Gumm Sisters, the trio worked the vaudeville circuit through the late 1920s and early 1930s, with their mother serving as manager and accompanist. Around 1934 the act adopted the stage name The Garland Sisters, and Frances took the first name Judy, reportedly inspired by a popular Hoagy Carmichael song ^[2].

The act dissolved as the sisters grew up, but the youngest had already attracted attention for a voice far bigger and more mature than her small frame suggested. In September 1935, at age thirteen, she auditioned for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was signed to a contract, an unusual step for a studio that rarely hired performers without a screen test tied to a specific role ^[1]. Her father died of meningitis just two months later, a loss she described throughout her life as devastating.

MGM initially struggled to cast its new teenage contract player, who was neither a child star nor a conventional ingenue. Her breakthrough came in Broadway Melody of 1938, in which she sang You Made Me Love You to a photograph of Clark Gable. The performance convinced studio executives that her singing could carry major pictures ^[2].

She was soon paired with Mickey Rooney in a run of popular musicals and Andy Hardy films, including Babes in Arms in 1939, and the two became one of the most bankable young teams in Hollywood ^[1]. The partnership fixed her image as the earnest girl next door, an image the studio protected carefully even as it placed heavy demands on her schedule, her weight and her appearance.

The role that defined her arrived in 1939, when she played Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. Her performance of Over the Rainbow, written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, became her signature song for the rest of her life. In 1940 she received the Academy Juvenile Award in recognition of her screen work as a young performer ^[3]. The film was only a modest financial success on first release, but repeated theatrical reissues and later television broadcasts turned it into one of the most watched movies ever made.

Any account of Judy Garland achievements must cover both her film work and her concert career. Through the 1940s she starred in a string of MGM musicals, most notably Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, directed by Vincente Minnelli, in which she introduced The Trolley Song and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas ^[2]. She appeared opposite Fred Astaire in Easter Parade in 1948, another major hit, and by the end of the decade she ranked among the studio's most valuable stars.

Her relationship with MGM collapsed in 1950 after years of exhaustion, missed shooting days and dependence on prescription medication, a dependence biographers trace back to the amphetamines and barbiturates supplied during her teenage years at the studio ^[1]. Released from her contract, she reinvented herself on the concert stage. Her 1951 engagement at the Palace Theatre in New York ran for nineteen weeks and set a record for the venue, earning her a special Tony Award in 1952 ^[4].

She returned to film in 1954 with A Star Is Born, a Warner Bros. musical drama that brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and she was nominated again in 1962, this time for a supporting role in Judgment at Nuremberg ^[3]. The high point of her concert years came on April 23, 1961, at Carnegie Hall. The live recording of that evening, Judy at Carnegie Hall, spent thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, making her the first woman to win that prize ^[5]. The Library of Congress later added the album to the National Recording Registry ^[5].

Garland married five times. Her first marriage, to composer David Rose in 1941, ended in divorce, as did her 1945 marriage to director Vincente Minnelli, with whom she had a daughter, Liza Minnelli, born in 1946 ^[1]. Liza went on to her own celebrated career as a singer and actress, winning an Academy Award for Cabaret in 1973.

Her third marriage, to producer Sid Luft in 1952, was her longest and produced two children, Lorna and Joey Luft. Luft managed much of her concert and film work during the 1950s, including A Star Is Born, but the marriage was turbulent and ended in divorce in 1965 ^[6]. Brief marriages to actor Mark Herron and, in March 1969, to musician Mickey Deans followed.

Behind the public warmth, her adult life was marked by financial trouble, periods of poor health and a long struggle with dependence on sleeping pills and stimulants. She spoke openly in interviews about the pressures of her studio upbringing, and biographers have documented how debts, mismanagement and unpaid taxes forced her to keep performing even when her health made touring difficult ^[1].

In 1963 CBS gave her a weekly television variety program, The Judy Garland Show. Critics praised many of her performances, including a celebrated duet episode with a young Barbra Streisand, but the series was scheduled against the popular western Bonanza and was canceled after a single season in 1964 ^[2].

She spent the mid 1960s in near constant concert work across the United States, Australia and Europe, with results that swung between triumphant and chaotic as her health declined. A run of engagements at the Talk of the Town nightclub in London in early 1969 drew large audiences despite erratic appearances ^[6].

On June 22, 1969, Garland was found dead in the bathroom of her rented house in the Chelsea district of London, twelve days after her forty seventh birthday. The coroner ruled the death accidental, caused by an overdose of barbiturates taken over time rather than deliberately ^[7]. An estimated twenty thousand mourners filed past her casket at a Manhattan funeral home, a public outpouring reported on front pages around the world ^[7].

Few careers in American entertainment cast a longer shadow. In 2004 the American Film Institute ranked Over the Rainbow first on its list of the greatest songs in American cinema, and a 2001 survey by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts placed her 1939 recording at the top of its Songs of the Century project ^[8]. The Recording Academy honored her with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 ^[5].

Her influence extends well beyond her recordings. Generations of singers, from her daughter Liza Minnelli to modern pop and cabaret performers, cite her phrasing and emotional directness as a model. She also became an enduring figure for LGBTQ audiences, who embraced her music and her resilience during her lifetime, and her death has often been linked in popular memory to the days surrounding the Stonewall uprising in New York, though historians debate any direct connection ^[1].

Her story continues to be retold. The 2019 film Judy, covering her final London concerts, won Renee Zellweger an Academy Award for portraying her. In her birthplace of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the Judy Garland Museum preserves artifacts from her life and hosts an annual festival ^[9]. Among the most striking Judy Garland facts is the sheer span of her career: roughly forty five years on stage, screen, radio, records and television, nearly all of it begun before she was old enough to vote. Any Judy Garland biography ultimately returns to the voice itself, an instrument of unusual warmth and urgency that audiences continue to discover more than half a century after her death.