Judy Garland was an American singer, actress, and vaudevillian. She was renowned for her contralto vocals and attained international stardom that continued throughout a career spanning more than 40 years as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist, and on concert stages.
Garland began performing in vaudeville with her two older sisters and was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. She made more than two dozen films with MGM, including nine with Mickey Rooney. Among several well-remembered film appearances, Garland's most famous role was as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz . Her other most notable roles at MGM included Meet Me in St. Louis , The Harvey Girls and Easter Parade . After 15 years, she was released from the studio and made record-breaking concert appearances, had a successful recording career, and her own Emmy-nominated television series. Her film appearances became fewer in the later years of her career, but included two Academy Award-nominated performances in A Star Is Born and Judgment at Nuremberg .
Garland received a Golden Globe Award, a Juvenile Academy Award, and a Special Tony Award, and at 39, became the youngest and first female recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry. She was the first woman to win a Grammy for Album of the Year for her live recording of Judy at Carnegie Hall. In 1997, Garland was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Several of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1999, the American Film Institute placed her among the 10 greatest female stars of classic American cinema.
Despite profound professional success, Garland struggled largely in her personal life from an early age. The pressures of stardom affected her physical and mental health from the time she was a teenager; her self-image was influenced and constantly criticized by film executives who believed her to be physically unattractive, and who manipulated her onscreen physical appearance. She was plagued by alcohol and substance abuse as well as financial instability into her adulthood, often owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Her lifelong struggle with drugs and alcohol ultimately led to her death in England from a barbiturate overdose, at the age of 47.
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”
As quoted in Business Etiquette for the Nineties : Your Ticket to Career Success (1992) by Lou Kennedy, p. 8
Variant: Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.
Letter to Harold Arlen, as quoted in Over the Rainbow : The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1991) by Paul Nathanson, p. 340
As quoted in Little Girl Lost (1974) by Al DiOrio, p. 9
“You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage.”
LIFE magazine (2 June 1961)
Context: You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people.
“I've never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back.”
Interview, NBC TV (16 March 1961)
As quoted in Judy (1974) by Gerold Frank, p. 566
“I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.”
As quoted in The Observer (18 February 1951)
Garland's annoyed response to a note from Princess Margaret "commanding" her to sing at a party in 1965, as quoted in Princess Margaret : A Biography (1977) by Theo Aronson.
