Liza Minnelli’s 20 best films – ranked!
20. In the Good Old Summertime (1949)
Liza Minnelli’s first screen appearance was in this musical remake of The Shop Around the Corner, a vanishingly brief cameo as a three-year-old toddler. It’s full of poignant family significance and also uneasily prophetic, given that the adult Minnelli was all too often booked for nothing more than a celeb walk-on. The doe-eyed moppet appears in the film’s closing shot between Van Johnson and her real-life mother, Judy Garland; the pair, after their comedy-oferrors romance, are now assumed to be radiantly married parents. Little Liza is in an adorable white outfit: a mini-me getup matching her mother.
19. Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)
Here is a role and a movie that most Minnelli fans (and, come to think of it, most Dudley Moore fans) prefer to pass over in silence. Lovable alcoholic Arthur is now married to Minnelli’s Linda, the shoplifter he fell for in the first film; he loses all his money but is offered the chance to get his wealth back if he divorces his true love (Minnelli) and marry someone else. Rather nobly, he refuses. It’s rather low energy and low on laughs, but Minnelli does at least carry a plausible supporting role.
18. The King of Comedy (1982)
Another of Minnelli’s meta-cameos, this deleted scene surfaced many years afterwards, revealing that Scorsese had reunited his stars from New York, New York. Minnelli plays herself in the delusional Rupert Pupkin’s dream of being on the top-rated TV chatshow, hosted by the glowering star Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). With some poise, she plays a deadpan straight-woman role, as blowhard Rupert continually interrupts her anecdotes.
17. The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
Minnelli would be a brilliant proper Muppet guest star: a Muppet Cabaret is the obvious choice. But in reality, all we got was this very brief cameo playing herself as Kermit enters the restaurant Sardi’s in New York. Kermit is pretending to be a bigshot producer, hoping to spread whispered rumours among the moneyed crowd that his show is the one to invest in. He sneakily takes Minnelli’s photo off the wall and replaces it with his own, just she sweeps in; she is deeply annoyed at being erased by the Muppet upstart.
16. Silent Movie (1976)
Mel Brooks’s all-star stunt-casting extravaganza was a silent movie featuring himself as a washed-up director who needs stars to appear in his planned silent movie. One star that he and his two buddies (Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise) approach is Minnelli, who is one day eating lunch at that legendary place that had in 1976 not quite vanished from Hollywood mythology: the studio commissary. The three guys dressed as knights in armour clank up to her table, kicking off some uproarious physical comedy. Minnelli very gamely joins in.
15. Halston (2019)
Fashion documentarist Frédéric Tcheng gave us this study of designer Roy Halston – creator of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat – which had some interesting commentary from his great friend and ally Minnelli. She is being featured here in the role of an intelligent expert observer, rather than an opaque star commodity. The movie shows Minnelli’s own role in the history of fashion and her grasp of how costume works with choreography. “His clothes danced with you,” she says of
Halston’s work.
14. Charlie Bubbles (1968)
Albert Finney’s sole directorial outing was this very 1960s romp about a fashionable northern writer, Charlie (Finney), who becomes gigantically rich and famous and winds up in a mood of directionless despondency in