![]() ![]() Starring Burt Reynolds, James Remar, Richard Masur, Bernie Casey, John Stanton, John P. Written by Michael Blodgett and Dennis Shryack. Tour our photo gallery of Minnelli’s 10 greatest films, including a few in which she didn’t sing and dance.ĭirected by Jerry London. Though her film credits are sparse, Minnelli has remained active onscreen, most famously playing loopy socialite Lucille Austero in the Emmy-winning series “Arrested Development.” So she’s just a Grammy away from joining the elite ranks of EGOT winners. That same year, Minnelli took home an Emmy for the TV special “Liza with a Z” (directed by her “Cabaret” helmer Fosse, who also won). The role also brought her Golden Globe and BAFTA victories. Directed by Bob Fosse, the film was a dark, decadent, and kinky musical that stood in stark contrast to the bright, cheerful songfests that made her parents famous. She won that prize just three years later for “Cabaret” (1972), a big screen adaptation of Kander and Ebbs’s landmark Broadway show about a nightclub singer in 1930s Berlin. Pakula‘s “The Sterile Cuckoo” (1969), playing an eccentric college student romancing an uptight coed ( Wendell Burton). She earned her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress for Alan J. She quickly recorded a series of highly-successful albums, including “Liza! Liza!” (1964), “It Amazes Me” (1965) and “There Is Time” (1966). Much like her famous mother, she started performing at an early age, singing and dancing her way to a Tony win for John Kander and Fred Ebbs‘s “Flora the Red Menace” in 1965 when she was just 19 years old. The daughter of actress Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, it seems almost inevitable that Minnelli would chase the spotlight. It ran 233 performances, closing after eight months.Liza Minnelli is the multi-talented performer who has made only a handful of movies during her long career, but how many of them are classics? Let’s take a look back at 10 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best. Fittingly, Minnelli won a Tony award for her performance, but the show itself lost out. Minnelli sings the songs with her usual verve, vanishing only for "Little Do They Know" and its reprise, a song that addresses the star-vehicle nature of the project. As a result, the score failed her, and that's what one gets on a cast album which is little more than a Minnelli solo recording with the thinnest indication that the performances derive from a book musical. ![]() Ebb's free-floating cynicism was at home in the era of Watergate, of course, but it ran counter Minnelli's "the show must go on" enthusiasm. But The Act was set in the present day while Kander threw in the occasional disco rhythm and electric guitar lick, he really didn't have a feel for the music of the 1970s, and it showed. Kander and Ebb tended to enjoy their greatest successes with period works, especially those set in the 1920s (Chicago) or '30s (Cabaret), for which Kander could apply his expertise in hot jazz styles and Ebb could vent his negative world view. But the thin plot was really just an excuse to put the star on-stage in a bunch of new songs except for one choral number, "Little Do They Know," Minnelli sang every song in the show. With music and lyrics by her favorite songwriting team, John Kander and Fred Ebb, it was a backstage musical concerning a fading film star attempting a comeback in Las Vegas. Although she had served briefly as a replacement in the musical Chicago in 1975, Liza Minnelli returned to Broadway in her own show for the first time in 12 years with The Act, which opened in New York on October 29, 1977. ![]()
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