Liza Minnelli

• Genre: Cabaret
• Hometown: New York City
• Liza Minnelli Website

About

With her father's (the great director, Vincente Minnelli) facial features and her mother's (Judy Garland) brassy vocal delivery, Liza Minnelli has spent most of her career seeming like a performer lost in time. A major talent, she burst onto television, Broadway and film while still a teen in the late '60s. The links to her mother's famous “take no prisoners” vocal approach are more genetic than studied. Being a little sensitive to her connections, Minnelli at first avoided singing but couldn't hide her talent for long. She is no longer the Tony and Oscar winning Cabaret superstar she was in the 1970s, but she is still a vital stage performer, and her collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys was a hit across Europe. With today's renewed interest in classic pop singing, she released her best album, Gently, a collection of standards featuring such jazz names as Herbie Hancock and Pete Jolly) in 1996. Sadly, she suffers from the same problems as her mother and she has become tabloid fodder of late, aging decades over a period of a few months.

- Nick Dedina