It was Liza who held her mother's hand after failed suicide attempts, and talked Garland through her soul-crushing depressions. On Broadway at 19, Minnelli became the youngest actress to win a Tony award. She was raised on the MGM lot where her mother filmed, and made her screen debut aged two in Garland's musical In The Good Old Summertime. Minnelli grew up watching her mother drink excessively to calm raging insecurities, relying on uppers to keep her performing, amphetamines to control her weight, and downers to help her sleep. Her survival to 75 is reason enough for celebration, as one of the rare children of Hollywood legends to have emerged from their parent's long shadow, and somehow escaped reenacting her mother's premature death - though it wasn't for lack of trying. And the rest of the time, I feel like I'm 80.
I never think about age." In her mid-sixties - an age many doubted she would attain - she said: "Half the time I feel like I'm 12. "I am ageless," Minnelli said on a recent birthday. Her mother died at the age of 47 after a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, and Minnelli has waged her own brutal battles with addiction, along with other woes: she suffered a near-fatal brain infection, surgeries that almost ended her career, and four bitter divorces.
She left with cocaine, marijuana, Valium and four Mandrax sedative pills. Artist Andy Warhol recalled in his 1978 diary that Minnelli turned up at the New York home of fashion designer Halston begging: "Give me every drug you've got!" Yet she hasn't always asked for the right kind of help.
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