The real-life torment that haunted Judy Garland’s London years

Judy Garland’s final decade was bookended by professional engagements in London. As the Sixties got into gear, she was in town to shoot the movie I Could Go On Singing (1963), for English director Ronald Neame. It proved to be her final big-screen role. Garland plays Jenny Bowman, star of the concert stage, who is here to pack out the London Palladium during one of her international tours. As drama with a semi-autobiographical dimension, it is a fitfully fascinating film and boasts one or two electrifying sequences. Chief of these is the one where Garland is seen in the wings of the Palladium, psyching herself up for a big entrance. Her face positively looms with expectant delight. She jiggles in an agitated dance of anticipation. Her palms thwack together to the beat of the magnificent orchestra as it builds and builds. She spurs it on with a roar of “Go!”. It leaves the viewer with a matchless sense of what it must be like to be a hugely talented performer swaying on the brink of delivering herself to an adoring public

There is a special reason why the Jenny character bursts out to give even more than her all at that particular performance. Out in the stalls, clutching his programme and agog with excitement is her 10-year-old son from an affair with a distinguished English surgeon, who is played (with an astute instinct for how best to support Garland) by Dirk Bogarde. The son has been brought up by the surgeon to believe he was adopted from another family. His actual mother now longs to see him – the great star having to infiltrate her boy’s life under the guise of a shy, painfully eager and exotic tourist who can offer him fun treats like these tickets to her show. Garland is brilliant at conveying the anguished jauntiness, laced with genuine joy, that this involves

So there’s a pointed link between the circumstances dramatised in that underrated old film and the more fraught and sprawling situation, at the other end of the decade, that is evoked in the new movie Judy. It’s directed with shrewd insight by the Almeida’s artistic director, Rupert Goold – the latest in the interesting tradition of perceptive Englishmen who have served Garland well. It stars a hotly Oscar-tipped Renée Zellweger: the actress strikes the signature Judy poses (microphone-lead trailed over the shoulder, etc) with strung-out sensitivity and opens her lungs with admirable finesse as well. We are introduced to the hard-working diva at the moment she realises she’s caught in a horrible real-life Catch 22. Flat-broke, zonked, evicted from her hotel suite, she yearns to be able to set up a stable home for Lorna and Joey, her children by third husband Sid Luft. She can’t afford to turn down the chance to do a series of concerts and accepts an invitation to play a season at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub (now the Hippodrome). But this will put an ocean between herself and her kids and may well torpedo her credibility in the pending battle over custody. If she could go on not singing... would that make her any less unhappy?

One can think of many ways in which this movie could have gone badly wrong. By succumbing, say, to Gothic camp: Whatever Happened to Baby Judy in full collision with a secular, substance abuser’s Stations of the Cross. Or it could have fetched up as A Grotesquely Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Carnaby Street with an Edvard Munch respray of the Munchkins. Instead, Goold’s film has been lucidly pondered so as to be surgically incisive without being sensational. The horrors of the MGM studio system – which could subject a sensitive child star such as Judy to a slave labour regime of uppers, downers, starvation rations and the dubious privileges that come with being the boss’s favourite – is filtered through the protagonist’s 46-year-old psyche. The soundstage of The Wizard of Oz is the purgatory from which she will never be granted an exeat. This conceit, developed with intelligent restraint, suggests the palette of Goold’s movie, while the structural quirks of Oz are echoed (in reverse) in Judy by the way characters who feature in the fantastical frame are able to resurface as, say, the two devoted, middle-aged gay fans who shyly waylay their heroine in the forlorn, wet streets of London.

Goold talks animatedly about what drew him to the material. “I’m fascinated by the late, late style of performers who were once at the top of their game – Johnny Cash, Roger Federer – and how they husband what is left of it to carry on.” In the theatre, he’s had experience of needing to shove and heave incapacitated thesps onto the boards. This happens, of course, to the vodka-soaked, pill-popping Garland, frogmarched down the long, tiled corridors of the Talk of the Town by Rosalynd, her very firm, exasperated but very caring assistant. Is it a bit perverse, I ask, of a theatre director to want to commit such an inherently live event to celluloid? (Before it was adapted into a screenplay by Tom Edge, the material began life as End of the Rainbow, a stage play by Peter Quilter. We talk about how a movie camera has the capacity to shift between capturing inner and outer loneliness. And, just as in Zellweger’s portrayal of the beleaguered icon, a movie camera has a pensive flexibility of manoeuvre; an actor can suggest, more minutely than in the theatre, the psychological roots of a performance style without needing to offer an exhaustive impersonation of it.

Goold reveals that at one stage there was to have been a scene where Garland visited a secret gay bar in London where she was confronted by a drag version of herself. They couldn’t get it to work within the rhythm of the story. He also reveals that when Judy was test-screened, it got its highest approval ratings from young women. Not everything about it works. I beg leave to doubt that – even at a time of literally depending on the kindness of strangers – she ever found herself making a pivotal long-distance call to her kids from a red telephone box. I wonder too if it undersells the fact that the actual opening night at the Talk of the Town was an enormous success. The Financial Times critic wrote that “she is the Maria Callas of popular music”. It was only later that things slid so regrettably into insult and food-throwing.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Garland’s artistry and for the therapeutic force of her warmly wayward presence. I love how Garland’s singing voice swings rather than throbs with heartbreak. My absolute favourite bit of her is her treatment of the song “Chicago” on a 1964 TV transmission of The Judy Garland Show. Her voice is thrilling in its elasticity; she’s almost manic with the joy of the song and the desire to share its jokes: “They have the time, the time of their life/ I saw a man who danced with his wife/ In Chicago...”

I was worried the film would be one of those stomping-on-the-grave exercises, but it’s suffused with affection and respect for its heroine. However low she falls, you never doubt that there are redeeming features in Judy Garland that cannot help but inspire love in others. Zellweger has clearly watched a stack of the TV interviews she gave (all there on YouTube) in which, regardless of how “over-refreshed” she was at the time, Garland’s wicked, sly, generous humour always emerges. On the bad evenings during that season at the Talk of the Town, she sang – desperately, drunkenly – about how she loved London and its people above all her tour-stops. Londoners scarcely showed themselves in their best light by throwing things at her. Is it poetic justice that this movie – which, in its very uncloying way, makes a kind of amends – is the work of a London-based director?

She led Ronald Neame a terrible dance when he directed her in I Could Go On Singing. Her incorrigible lateness wreaked havoc on carefully laid plans – such as sessions booked at the Palladium with expensively hired extras to pose as her public. It seemed, initially, that she was adding insult to injury when she bade farewell to the unit with the prophecy that they would miss her when she was gone. In a filmed tribute to her, the veteran director had to fight tears when recalling how quickly her comment came to feel achingly accurate. Judy is not the last word on the subject, nor does it pretend to be. But it’s a healthy reminder of a valuable truth. Despite or perhaps because of her demons, Judy Garland – singer, hoofer, actress, symbol – stands firm as the most life-enhancing entertainer of her era.

Judy is in UK cinemas from Friday