If Judy had lived longer, who knows what gifts she would have bestowed upon the world. Because Judy died so long ago, it’s hard to believe she was actually the same age as Golden Girls star Betty White, who passed away just weeks before her own 100th birthday in December 2021. If she had stayed around, 9 June, 2022, would have been her 100th birthday. Judy tragically died aged 47 – she was found dead in a London hotel on 22 June, 1969, and was found to have overdosed on barbiturates. In short, it’s unsurprising that queer people still worship her legacy to this day. She also was also the personification of camp and was clear that it didn’t bother her in the least that she had so many gay fans. In Judy, LGBTQ+ people also saw an icon filled with extraordinary talent – she wasn’t just somebody who struggled, she was a person who had the capability to reduce a concert hall full of people to tears. Queer people naturally gravitated towards her – just like them, she was an outsider, somebody who had been abused and cast aside. Judy Garland had many challenges, but she also had countless successes during her lifetime. Queer people gravitated towards Judy, an outsider who brought them joy However, her struggles with addiction resulted in her being seen as “difficult” by some within the industry, and directors and studios were increasingly reluctant to work with her. That wasn’t the end of Garland’s film career – she was later nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn in 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, and she made her last film I Could Go On Singing in 1963. Producers behind the scenes were so sure Judy would take home the gong that they sent a camera crew to her hospital room so she could give an acceptance speech live – she had just given birth to her son Joey Luft. It remains one of the biggest upsets in Oscars history – Kelly won by just six votes. Judy was widely expected to win the Oscar for Best Actress that year, but she lost out in the end to Grace Kelly, who scooped the award for The Country Girl. Judy Garland in a scene from A Star is Born. Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of Judy’s career – in 1954, she staged her comeback with what is easily the finest performance of her career in A Star Is Born. The film tells the story of Esther Blodgett, a rising star who meets and falls in love with Norman Maine, a former matinée idol whose career is in decline as he struggles with addiction. Two years after that first breakdown, Judy was fired from Annie Get Your Gun, and she was later let go by MGM in the face of an addiction its executives had played a part in creating. That year, she had a breakdown, and her tendency to turn up late to film sets led to her being fired from a number of high-profile projects. Her struggles with addiction were becoming more and more pronounced and she was having mental health issues. It’s impossible to discuss her life without discussing the issues she had with drugs, but it also feels somehow crass to reduce her to the pain that dogged her throughout her life. It would also be unjust to ignore the challenges because so many of them were caused by the studio she worked for.īy 1947, Judy’s career was on a downward trajectory. Judy’s struggles have been well-documented. Tom Drake (1918 – 1982), Judy Garland (1922 – 1969) and Margaret O’Brien in a promotional portrait for Meet Me In St. It introduced the world to songs like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, sung with devastating restraint by Judy, but it also introduced film-goers to a new, more grown-up version of the girl they had fallen in love with in Oz. She was no longer a child – she was a young adult burgeoning with hope and passion, an actor and performer whose career would surely only continue to blossom. It might not be as famous as The Wizard of Oz, but Meet Me In St Louis quickly became a box office hit. I felt a yearning for Oz, and I felt like I intimately understood Dorothy’s desire to go home, to retreat into warmth and safety. That film filled me with what can be best described as nostalgia. I can still remember spending my evenings watching the film on repeat on a grainy VHS and feeling something that I still struggle to describe. That’s why I felt no shame or trepidation about my burgeoning obsession with The Wizard of Oz (I had only recently finished my Grease phase). I was too swishy, too exuberant, too keen on writing “novels” on the family computer that ripped off Harry Potter (yes, this really happened).ĭespite all of this, I was lucky – home was my safe place. I was being bullied at school, my self-esteem was nosediving, and I was starting to have a sneaking suspicion that there was something a little bit different about me.Įven worse, it was around that time that I started to realise that my differences weren’t something to be celebrated. Like plenty of queer people, that time wasn’t exactly the happiest for me.
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