The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Bring me the voice of Judy Garland!
With fake nose and wig, Renée Zellweger looks the part in the troubled star’s biopic. But could she learn to sing like her, too?
Judy Garland was one of the greatest singers of all time. “And I’m not!” says Renée Zellweger, eyes bulging in comical alarm. “I always felt I have a really tiny voice. And I’m not consistent, so I’ve never done musical theatre. I just thought it wasn’t for me.” That didn’t stop the Oscar-winning actress, who proved she could hold a tune in Chicago (2004), from taking the part of Garland in a remarkable new biopic which required her to sing live on stage in front of a big band. What made her think she could do it?
“Well, I didn’t,” she says, giggling. “I was very sure I couldn’t do it!” Zellweger was wrong: her performance is riveting – and already being identified as her shot at a second Oscar, 16 years after she won Best Supporting Actress for Cold Mountain.
Set in London in 1968, Judy – the second feature, after 2015’s True Story, from English theatre director Rupert Goold – focuses on a five-week run of concerts at The Talk of the Town nightclub months before Garland’s death, aged 47, from a barbiturate overdose. By then, the Wizard of Oz star – who had started performing aged two, as plain Frances Gumm – was a frail, lonely, needy, sleep-deprived alcoholic and drug addict, essentially broke, homeless and unemployable in Hollywood.
Those final concerts were notoriously ragged, chaotic affairs shot through with flashes of genius, the defiant last stand of a showbiz trouper. In recreating them, Zellweger “wasn’t trying to emulate Judy at the technical zenith of her career, when she was young and healthy and had full access to her instrument – that would have been a lot more daunting. Instead it was about telling the story of someone who had been performing for a very long time and the cost of that, both physically and emotionally.”
When I caught an early screening of the film in the summer, Zellweger snuck into the cinema and curled up in the front row. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she struck a goofy, amiable figure, with more than a touch of the Bridget Jones’s about her.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” she whispered. “Just ignore me.”
On screen – in prosthetic nose, brunette wig and Sixties costume – Zellweger not only looks like Garland but captures her contradictory combination of vulnerability and ego, too. And then there are the songs: the record label, Decca, was so impressed by Zellweger’s renditions of Garland’s hits that it is releasing an album of them, featuring extra tracks and duets with fellow Garland fans Rufus Wainwright and Sam Smith.
“I was told, and maybe foolishly had faith, that the voice is a muscle, and there is a method for strengthening it, and you can work and build toward that,” says Zellweger. “And we had time, so that felt like a safety net.”
While preparing, she listened to Garland every day. “I had to get myself into her environment, her voice, her speech patterns. She was vulnerable, always hopeful. Funny, naughty, smart.”
Helping her was the British conductor Matt Dunkley, who also wrote new arrangements of Garland classics for the film. “We had a quick rehearsal just to see whether this was going to be achievable,” he says. “Renée’s natural voice is light and high, it’s a head voice. Whereas Judy Garland, at the end of her life, her voice was deep down in the chest and quite rich and full. So we worked with vocal coaches to help Renée put her voice down lower. And that
took quite a bit of time and creates a lot of strain. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Look, tomorrow, don’t talk, don’t sing, you’ve got to rest your voice or when it comes to filming, you won’t be able to speak at all.’”
Zellweger also worked with Gary Catona, a self-described “voice builder”, whose clients have included Whitney Houston, Andrea Bocelli, Brian Wilson, Lenny Kravitz and Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli.
“He does these exercises that open up your throat and move your vocal cords. They are guttural, strange howling noises that somehow become musical over the course of a year,” says Zellweger. When I ask if she’ll demonstrate, she demurs.
“No one needs to hear that.”
Zellweger rehearsed with Dunkley and a pianist three days a week in a room off the Edgware Road. “You go over and over and over and over again until it becomes muscle memory,” she says. “We just kept working until it sounded like the note we were meant to hit!”
On set, at the Hackney Empire, Zellweger sang each number in front of a live audience while being filmed in close-up. Then, to protect her voice, for the other angles she would mime. Only when filming was complete did she and Dunkley return to the studio with a 27-piece band and orchestra for her to record the final album vocals.
Sam Smith came in to duet on Get Happy: “He’s such a jerk!” Zellweger jokes, affectionately. “I’m huffing and puffing and it takes him three minutes and he’s done: extraordinary singer.”
On Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Zellweger was joined by American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. “That was an emotional moment, pretty overwhelming,” she says. “Rufus is always on my stereo. I told him we’ve been singing together for 20 years! You should hear us belting out [his songs] whilst driving through Laurel Canyon. We sound great!” (Other regulars blasted out of the Zellweger stereo include Tom Petty, The Beatles, “a lot of old Seventies rock and roll, old-school country like Johnny Cash, and great singer-songwriters like Lucinda Williams and Tom Waits”.)
Wainwright approached the biopic “with trepidation”. He has performed his own Garland tribute concerts, released a live album of covers, Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, in 2007, and is a friend of Garland’s daughters, Lorna Luft and Liza Minnelli – the latter of whom has stated that she did “not approve nor sanction” the film.
But Wainwright was reassured by Zellweger. “I was really moved by Renée’s performance, and I felt the film portrayed Judy in a positive light. Judy has begun to recede from the mainstream and it’s high time that she returned.”
For Wainwright, duetting with Zellweger “brought back some ghosts. Look, I’m not as good as Judy, Renée is not as good as Judy, there has never been anyone as good as her, in terms of her ability to capture a song and make it sear through your heart. The thing that Judy had in spades was a sense of vulnerability, that she could always express while at the same time emitting tremendous physical power. What I love about Renée’s rendition is she is not trying to outsing her, she’s offering a reflection of her greatness.”
Dunkley calls Garland’s voice “astonishing”. “She had this incredible Broadway belt... but she also had so much nuance and great jazz phrasing. Like Sinatra, she could pull around a song and always land in the right place.”
Zellweger tells me that “as a kid growing up, I took it for granted that Judy Garland was one of the great performers, and every year we’d all watch The Wizard of Oz on TV, with the rest of America. The later vocal recordings are quite surprising. Her voice is much lower and there are a couple of notes that she’d prefer to speak sometimes rather than sing but it’s maybe even more moving, because you can hear the life that she’s lived, you can feel the weathering of a soul who’s survived challenges and pain. It’s pretty powerful.
“I wouldn’t say that she was less exceptional in her later years. In fact, you could argue that, if the point of singing is to move someone and go into the narrative and actually share life experiences,
‘You can hear the life Garland’s lived, you can hear the weathering of a soul’
that she was even more extraordinary at the end.”
Has the experience of performing as Garland had an effect on Zellweger’s own voice? “It’s pretty interesting,” she says. “I discovered I haven’t been speaking in my lower register for my whole life. So it’s a bit different now. When I sing around the house, there are things I couldn’t do before. I’m glad of that.”
Now that Zellweger has made an album, albeit as Garland, I ask if she’s ready to perform in concert. She seems taken aback. “Oh gosh! I don’t know that I’m ready to stand up and do Carnegie Hall top to bottom. I know what just one of those belters requires!” She laughs. “I might need to do some more howling around Laurel Canyon first. Call me in a couple of years.”
Judy is in cinemas on Friday. The soundtrack album is out now on Decca