New York Post
Meet the parents
Liza talks (at last) about Mom and Dad
By LOU LUMENICK
Last Updated: 8:31 AM, December 5, 2010
Robert Osborne has known Liza Minnelli since the 1960s, but the Turner Classic Movies host says he never considered asking his longtime friend to sit down with him on “Private Screenings.”
“We don’t have that many of her films in our library and I would have never asked her to appear,” he says. “But we were at a party one night and she said, ‘I’d like to come on with you sometime and talk about growing up at MGM and about my mom and my dad.’ ”
And so Minnelli will be talking not only about her own film career but those of her famous parents, Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli.
While she’s talked about her father in the past (“she felt he never got the attention he deserved”) she “never wanted to cash in on her mother.”
Osborne says what comes across in the 50-minute interview — culled from more than two hours he taped — “is the delightful, funny lady I know but not a lot of people know.”
The interview is a nice comeback after Minnelli’s recent bizarre appearance on the Home Shopping Network where she was selling a line of clothing, including a velvet halter jumpsuit and jewelry (“I just started working with clay!”).
Osborne delights in having Minnelli, a remaining symbol of Hollywood royalty, on the show. “She grew up with Lana Turner living on one side and Humphrey Bogart on the other,” he says. “She has a perspective on Hollywood that nobody else has. There are other children of stars, but nobody has has a pair of parents who won Oscars.’ ”
Minnelli, who made her film debut as a two-year-old in her mother’s film “In The Good Old Summertime,” says that “they didn’t put any panties on me. All I remember is Van Johnson’s hand on my bottom. . .it was vaguely uncomfortable.”
She recalls sitting with her father on camera booms at MGM and visiting her mother’s sets. But at home, she says “it wasn’t glamorous. The last thing they wanted to talk about was show business.”
“I love the part when she’s asked about her reaction to seeing her mother as Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for the first time,’” Osborne says. “She says, ‘She was someone who tucked me in at night.’ ”
Her parents didn’t encourage her to go into acting, but she caught the bug after seeing “Bye Bye Birdie” on Broadway.
“The best piece of advice I got about acting was from my mother,” says Minnelli. “She said, ‘You have to listen to the other actor and try to figure out why they’re saying something.’ ”
Her favorite films of her mother’s, “The Clock” and “The Pirate,” were both directed by her father. After her mother died in 1969, her father remained a supportive presence and was with her the night she won the Best Actress Oscar for “Cabaret.”
He later directed her in his last film, “A Matter of Time” (1976).
“It was interesting, but it was also difficult because he was starting to get a form of dementia,” she recalls duirng the interview. “I did the best I could.”
‘Private Screenings’
Schedule:
Saturday, December 11
8 p.m. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
10 p.m. Private Screenings
11 p.m. The Clock (1945)
2:30 a.m. Private Screeings (Encore)
12:45 a.m. The Pirate (1948)
3:30 a.m. An American in Paris (1951)
5:30 a.m. Gigi (1958)
Tuesday, December 14
9 p.m. Cabaret (1972)
11:15 p.m. A Matter of Time (1976)
1 a.m. Stepping Out (1991)
4 a.m. Madame Bovary (1949)
6 a.m. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
8 a.m. Home From The Hill (1960)
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