Unpublished. Shoes kicked off, head thrown back, 19-year-old Liza Minnelli belts out a song for birthday party guests in 1965. From LIFE's report: "When a friend scolded her for singing for free she said, 'I don't care, I sing for me.'"
Bill Eppridge
'60s
In March 1965, when LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge spent time on assignment with Judy Garland’s enormously talented daughter, Liza Minnelli was just turning 19 and launching a titanic career of her own: she was about to debut on Broadway in Flora the Red Menace, in a role that would make her the youngest woman ever to win a Tony Award for lead actress. (Also on the show’s creative team: composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, who collaborated for the first time on Flora. They would team up in the future on such Broadway classics as  Cabaret — later made into a movie starring Minnelli, of course, in her Oscar-winning role as Sally Bowles — and Chicago.
Liza allowed Eppridge into her spirited rehearsals, and even invited him to her birthday party at a swinging New York discotheque. LIFE wound up publishing just one of Eppridge’s photos. Here, in tribute to Minnelli and her enduring career, LIFE.com presents an entire series of marvelous, previously unpublished images of a legend in the making.
Liza, of course, was no stranger to show business — she had performed with her mother at the London Palladium, appeared on TV variety shows and done a little work Off-Broadway — but Flora the Red Menace would be her highest-profile role to date, the gig that would nudge her out of the shadow of her famous parents and into her own spotlight.
Of Minnelli’s opening-night performance in Flora, LIFEwrote: “She acted and danced with an awkward, captivating charm, threw out ‘What-am-I-doing-here?’ looks, sang in a voice that boomed and belted, quivered sweetly, and occasionally got out of control — which only added to her likability… She certainly did look like her mother several rainbows ago. When she sang, there were echoes of Judy, too — the old catches and wavers and throbs that made a song sound like as if it were going through a nervous breakdown. But soon Judy’s image faded and Liza’s came into focus.”
In the decades since Eppridge made these wonderful, initmate shots of the budding star, Liza has performed at the world’s most famous concert halls, racked up countless awards for her singing and acting and delighted new generations of fans with scene-stealing appearances in contemporary pop culture touchstones like Arrested Development. But the times she had in her early years truly were something special. As Liza herself told LIFE in 1965: “Eighteen is great, but 19 is best of all. That’s when you’re opening in your first Broadway show.”
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