On it she told of her youth in vaudeville, before she soared to the top - and began the long fall back down. She was last seen on national television Saturday, when a Johnny Carson interview taped in 1968 was rerun. In 1963 she made 26 half-hour television shows for CBS.
She sang a sadder-but-wiser “Rainbow” at Carnegie Hall which became part of what some called one of the best live recordings ever made. She broke all-time vaudeville records at the Palace in New York in 1951, ’56 and ’57. People had to literally push me onto the stage.”īut she made a smashing comeback in personal appearances. I lost all my self-confidence for 10 years. MGM, where she had made 30 films, fired her when she failed to report for work, and cast Betty Hutton in role in “Annie Get Your Gun.” She slashed her throat with a broken water glass, was saved, then stuffed herself to obesity. Her film career and her life almost ended in 1950. Louis,” the Andy Hardy films in which she starred with Mickey Rooney, “The Harvey Girls,” “Easter Parade,” and, since 1954, “A Star is Born” and “Judgment at Nuremberg,” for which she received Oscar nominations. Most were big-budget musicals of the ‘40s, although she won critical esteem for her acting ability in later films.Īmong her starring roles were “Broadway Melody of 1938,” “Babes in Arms,” “Strike Up the Band,” “Ziegfeld Girl,” “Girl Crazy,” “Meet Me in St. It was estimated that her films made more than $100 million. “Actually, I get awfully bored with myself as a tragic figure.” “I’m always being painted a more tragic figure than I am,” she said in 1962.
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Her third husband, Sid Luft, said she attempt to kill herself 20 times in the 13 years they were married.īut she refused to stay down, despite recurring personal and professional disaster. When she was 28 she slashed her throat in a suicide try. By the time she was 23 she had had three nervous breakdowns. She made 12 films as a teen-ager and was under psychiatric treatment by the time she was 18. “Judy was a child who never had any childhood,” said Ray Bolger, a costar in “Oz,” Sunday, “She was a child who never grew up.”
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Her best known role was that of Dorothy, at 17, in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” - in which she sang the song which became her trademark: “Over the Rainbow.”Ī wistful teen-ager with a turned-up nose, brown eyes, brown hair and a rich, full voice, she became a top star in the big-star days of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s golden age.Īnd, in the process, she lost her own youth. “She evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar.”
“She doesn’t give a concert, she conducts a seance. “Judy has been coming back since she was invented,” a London critic once wrote. When her career - and, usually, her personal life - hit rock bottom, she would stage a spectacular comeback and again hit the bigtime. She was Hollywood’s queen of the comebacks. “An absolute blizzard.”īut, throughout her crisis-ridden career, she refused to quit fighting. “Some times I feel like I’m living in a blizzard,” she once said.