Judy Garland had a torrid life. She was a drug addict and an alcoholic; she suffered bouts of depression, attempted suicide, was always in debt despite earning vast sums through her films and concerts. Relationships were not her strong point as she was married five times and could never sustain a meaningful adult relationship. Ultimately, at the age of 47, she died alone of a drug overdose. It is easy to see why this tragic talent has been the subject of more than two dozen biographies. Now one of them, the ironically named Get Happy, is to be turned into a major movie with the Oscar-nominated actress Anne Hathaway as Garland.

The sad starlet
Get Happy paints a picture of Garland as a child who never had a
childhood. The daughter of vaudeville performers, her real name was Frances Gumm. She made her stage debut when she was two and soon went on the road in a singing and dancing act with her two older sisters. Her family was forced to leave Grand Rapids, Minnesota, when her father was accused of propositioning male ushers at the theatre that he managed. They moved to Los Angeles, where Garland’s
mother, Ethel, assured them they would all become stars.

While attending the Ma Lawler Stage School in LA, Garland was put under contract at MGM, the biggest studio in Hollywood. She was then only 13.

Ups and downs
Having been driven for years by the ultimate stage mother, the nagging, exploitative Ethel Gumm, Garland was now delivered into the studio factory system. Missing was any sort of personal back-up that might have been considered critical to her survival. Her mother had being plying her with drugs to keep her awake and put her to sleep while she was on the road, and at MGM she was fed with an expanded range of pharmaceuticals. There were pills to control her weight, to ward off depression, to give her the energy to get through the long working days at the studio.

Garland was pathologically insecure, and being surrounded by legendary beauties
such as Ava Garner, Lana Turner and Elizabeth Taylor at Metro only made her
more so. The head of the studio, Louis B. Mayer, referred to the 4 ft11 in
performer as “my little hunchback” . He made her wear rubberised discs to
straighten her nose and put caps on her teeth. She never had a chance to be
herself, and ultimately she had no idea of who she was.

One of her husbands, the director Vincente Minnelli, said Garland had a desperation to be loved that never left her. As Get Happy tells it, she
became a star over her 15 years at MGM, especially after the release of The
Wizard Of Oz in 1939, but she remained a torn, fragile and tragic human being.

Garland is the classic biopic subject, a rags-to-riches star who never developed the wherewithal to use her enormous talent to help her find personal happiness.

The king of cool
A succession of biographies of Steve McQueen presents a picture of a man
who was also stunted by a violent, deprived, and loveless childhood but who
was, at least partially, saved by a stint in the US Marines. His ex-wife,
the former dancer Neile Adams, who met McQueen as a struggling actor in
New York and remained with him for 16 years, has published a frank memoir
of their life together that is also to form the basis for a biopic.

After being abandoned by his father, a stunt pilot, when he was six
months old, McQueen spent his early years moving between his grandparents
in Slater, Missouri, and his mother in Los Angeles. In his early teens he
began to run with street gangs in LA and stole cars and committed other
petty crimes. His mother remarried twice; after a fight with his
second stepfather, she signed a court order which classified Steve as “incorrigible” and remanded him to the Junior Boys Republic, a home for delinquent boys, at Chino Hills in California.

After he got out, at the age of 16, McQueen left his mother’s home, which was now in Greenwich Village. He wandered from state to state and from job to job , working as a towel boy in a brothel, on an oil rig, as a trinket salesman in a carnival and as a lumberjack.

Just over a year later, he joined the Marines. He was demoted on no less than seven occasions and once went AWOL for two weeks, but his three-year tour helped him to grow up and develop a personal discipline. It was through the GI Bill that he began to pursue an acting career when he was discharged.

McQueen incorporated some of his rebel nature into his movie persona when he became the “ king of cool” with the films The Great Escape and Bullitt in the 1960s, but his biographers paint him as a more turbulent character in real life. The books on him are generally at one, in portraying a mean, habitually suspicious, self-serving , narrow-minded and deeply conservative man.

The voice
For the third of three major film-industry biopics that are on the cards, Universal Studios recently announced that it had acquired the life rights to the story of Frank Sinatra and that the movie would be made by Martin Scorsese.

The project has the blessing of Sinatra’s family. That makes you wonder how
it will deal with his famous involvement with the Mafia, his controversial relationship with the Kennedy family and his colourful and occasionally violent personal life.