We do indeed live in a strange and cracked up world, where every entertainer, princess, and first lady is supposed to look like Miss Universe in order to vindicate themselves and appease the jealous public that they are worthy of so much fame, money, and power. We need only compare the coverage of the late Diana, Princess of Wales and her equally charismatic daughter-in-law Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, with that of the reviled Sarah, Duchess of York, and the widely hated Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, both of whom are sorely lacking in the looks department.
The news media and the powers that be (agents, executives, producers, directors, etc.) are just as responsible, and since men still rule the roost it will continue to stay that way. Critics have often panned a woman's performance if they don't like her appearance. The most egregious example was the terrible lampooning of Sofia Coppola in The Godfather III movie in 1990. Thank God she actually does have talent and later won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Lost in Translation. Her direction of Marie Antoinette was also superb. I think she would have won anyway due to nepotism, but she deserved it.
The fact that the gorgeous Grace Kelly downplayed her beauty with drabness and played someone two decades older in order to be Oscar worthy in The Country Girl doesn't justify the fact that the great Garland was robbed of the Best Actress prize. Judy was ten times the actress and talent that Grace was, although I admit that Grace Kelly had more class and beauty and was so perfectly suited to become the wife of a European prince, even if he did reign over a tiny kingdom that was/still is a tax haven for rich crooks. It's doubly ironic that Grace Kelly at age twenty-six at the height of her fame looked much older then than actresses in their forties do today.
I hate to rant like this, but I am further infuriated with the fact that few people nowadays remember what a great all-around performer and triple-threat Judy Garland was: a fabulous singer, dancer, and actress. Grace was a pretty good actress who only ever had to play herself as an heiress, top model, or trophy wife (which she was in real life). She never had to stretch herself as an actress. And a lot of her acting was affected and mannered with an English accent she had cultivated, although this was done to the maximum effect in her greatest film Rear Window. It would have made more sense if she had won the Oscar for the Hitchcock classic.
Judy had guts and courage due to her rough childhood on the vaudeville circuit. Grace was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, as were Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, those other prized stallions in the MGM stable. Back then, if you came from a lower class background, those were the parts you were cast in. Judy played a lot of chorus girls, singers, etc. And Marilyn Monroe was typecast the same way because the studio bosses perceived her as a working-class bimbo. When the aristocratic Audrey Hepburn came on the scene, roughly at the same time as Monroe and Kelly, Billy Wilder said it was refreshing to see such a lovely new face that didn't have that cheap look with the loose sweater girl appeal: "Not since Garbo has there been anyone like her, with the possible exception of Ingrid Bergman. After so many drive-in waitresses in movies, here is class." One writer at the time put it in a nutshell: "It's Judy Garland born in a vaudeville trunk vs. Grace Kelly born in a Philadelphia mansion." Living proof that the critic Danny Peary was right when he wrote in 1991 that Hollywood was obsessed with prestige.
On some other notes: I would just like to say that this is Judy's greatest film role other than as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (my all-time favorite movie). It is also the best of the four films made with the same storyline, although only Barbra Streisand's 1976 version is actually an Oscar winner (for Best Original Song). How fitting. Barbra adored Judy and got her first break on television on Garland's variety show when she was barely twenty. I have a feeling that Barbra's movie was a tribute to Judy's memory. Streisand is the greatest female talent Hollywood has produced since Judy Garland.
Doesn't Judy look so much like her daughter Liza Minnelli in this picture? I can't get over it. She didn't age well, but she looks wonderfully vibrant and healthy, if not pretty, as Esther/Vicki at the age of thirty-one, which she was at the time they filmed A Star Is Born.
I suppose it would have been difficult for the Academy to give Judy the Award since her character Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester actually wins the Best Actress statuette in the movie, and because of the fact that Garland did win the honorary Juvenile Oscar in 1940 when she was a mere seventeen for her role as Dorothy in Oz.
Of the two alcoholic husband performances which were also nominated that year, I prefer James Mason's Norman Maine over Bing Crosby's Frank Elgin in The Country Girl, although I admit that Bing's acting in this topped his 1944 winning role in Going My Way. It's too bad that Brando had the Oscar-hungry role in On The Waterfront. In my humble opinion: a tie between Mason and Marlon since Bing already had one.
Finally: A Time magazine article this fall lamented Hollywood's obsession with remaining ageless, noting that fifty-one-year-old Sandra Bullock looked half the age of the middle-aged Princess Grace who died at 52 in 1982, and that if botox had been all the rage back then the former Grace Kelly would have looked old for her age. Or rather, she'd look old for her age today. Never mind Judy Garland, who did indeed look old for her age when she died much too soon of a drug overdose at the age of forty-seven in 1969 when Sandra was still a babe in the woods.
reply
share