"It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years except they had little to do with being a child." - Liza Minnelli

AT the age of seven, Liza Minnelli shared New York's Palace stage with her mom, Judy Garland; by eleven, she had already become adept at coping with Judy's boozy stabs at suicide. At nineteen, she was on Broadway, and she became the youngest actress to win a Tony (for Flora, The Red Menace). Singing and dancing in nightclubs and London's Palladium, recording albums, and appearing on TV, Minnelli's exuberant talent quickly made her an international star. At twenty-three, she won an Oscar nomination as a dramatic actress, for her second film, The Sterile Cuckoo, and, at twenty-six, took home the statue for Cabaret.

Tonys and Emmys piled up rapidly for a TV special, a stage show, and another Broadway production. She piled up difficult lovers with equal speed: Peter Sellers, Martin Scorsese, Desi Arnaz, Jr., a Parisian nobleman, and a Brazilian playboy. First husband Peter Allen turned out to be gay, and she left her second husband, Jack Haley, Jr., for Scorsese. A third marriage, to sculptor Mark Gero, produced miscarriages and a third divorce. In 1984, the Betty Ford Clinic provided detox from drugs and booze. A few years later, hamming it up again, Minnelli toured with Sinatra and in her own new stage act. It's true she inherited her mother's great piercing voice and teary, twitchy vivacity; we can only be thankful that the mother-to-daughter legacy didn't include Garland's shaky instinct for survival.
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