Biography

Liza Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress, singer, and dancer whose career spans musical theater, film, television, recordings, and live performance. The daughter of actress and singer Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli, she grew up within Hollywood but established a distinctive identity through an intensely physical performance style, a powerful alto voice, and an ability to combine vulnerability with theatrical command. She is sometimes misspelled "Liza Minelli."

After moving to New York City as a teenager, Minnelli began her professional stage career in the 1963 Off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward. Her Broadway breakthrough came with Flora the Red Menace in 1965. At 19, she became the youngest woman at that time to win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The award established her as a major theater performer and began her important professional association with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb.

Minnelli reached an international audience with her portrayal of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's film adaptation of Cabaret (1972). Her performance as the ambitious, unstable entertainer in 1930s Berlin earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award. The film also gave Minnelli one of her defining screen personas: glamorous, unruly, emotionally exposed, and utterly committed to performance.

The same year, she collaborated with Kander, Ebb, and Fosse on the television concert special Liza with a Z. Combining song, dance, costume, and sharply controlled staging, the program became one of the most celebrated television performances of its era and won Minnelli an Emmy Award. It also demonstrated that her greatest impact often came not from conventional narrative acting but from the concentrated energy of a live show.

Her film work during the 1970s included Lucky Lady (1975), A Matter of Time (1976), directed by her father, and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977), in which she starred opposite Robert De Niro. The latter produced the title song, which became one of her signature recordings. On Broadway, she won another Tony for The Act (1978), a role that allowed her to build an entire dramatic world around the figure of a returning nightclub performer.

Minnelli continued to alternate between stage and screen. She appeared in the successful comedy Arthur (1981), played a leading role in The Rink (1984), and starred in the film musical Stepping Out (1991). Her recording career includes albums such as Liza! Liza!, It Amazes Me, New Feelin', Gently, and Confessions. The 1989 album Results, produced with the Pet Shop Boys, brought her voice into a contemporary electronic and dance-pop setting without abandoning her dramatic phrasing.

In later years, Minnelli remained closely associated with concert performance and theatrical revues, including Minnelli on Minnelli and Liza's at the Palace!. The latter earned her a fourth Tony Award in 2009. Her career honors also include two Golden Globe Awards and the Grammy Legend Award. Across several generations of entertainment, Minnelli has remained known less for stylistic restraint than for total commitment: every song, gesture, and entrance is treated as an event.