Tapping back into the old routine

8 September 1991 The Sunday Times (UK) newspaper

With a new film about to receive a royal charity premiere and a stage show to follow, Liza Minnelli is enjoying the limelight. Kate Saunders talks to the all-round entertainer with an impeccable Hollywood pedigree. Photograph by Simon Townsley.

It's like your first sight of the Leaning Tower of Pisa - you're astounded by its resemblance to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Liza Minnelli sidles shyly into her suite at London's Savoy Hotel, extending a cold little hand, and you can't get over how much she looks like, well, Liza Minnelli. Good grief, this really is the original Liza with a Zee ("I'm Liza with a Zee, not Lisa with an Ess, 'cause Lisa with an Ess goes Ssss not Zzzz"), whose Oscar-winning performance in the 1972 film Cabaret made us all wonder how we would look in a bowlers hat and suspenders.

She is small and thin, wearing an unattractive pink polo-neck twinset against the chill of an English summer. Like many famous people, her head seems too large for her body. Her hair is too black. The macabre effect of an animated waxwork is heightened by the fact that her face is plastered in make-up - including false eyelashes long enough to sweep the carpet.

"All this stuff on my face..." she apologises, "excuse me, but I was doing pictures all morning. I feel as if I'm wearing a mask. I hate wearing make-up." Minnelli is being whisked along a production line of publicity, as she gears up for the royal charity premiere of her latest film, Stepping Out, in London on September 19.

It is still possible to see, through the carapace of paint, that Minnelli looks younger than her 45 years. She has not changed much since she was telling us that life is a Cabaret, old chum. Here is the same gamine haircut; the same ski-jump nose, the eternally pouting lower lip and retreating chin; the same beautiful, liquid, brown Bambi eyes.

Those eyes, a legacy from her mother, are a compelling link to film legend. As the late Fred Astaire once observed: "If Hollywood breeding could be compared to royalty, Liza would be our Crown Princess." Her father, Vincente Minnelli, was one of the great directors (Gigi, An American in Paris) of the Hollywood musical's golden age. Her mother was, of course, Judy Garland.

Unfortunately, one of Minnelli's coffee-bearing, phone-answering retinue has already begged me not to ask about her mother, "because she gets so tired of it". No tin men, no trolley songs, and definitely no rainbows. And no questions about Minnelli's 1984 sojourn in the Betty Ford Clinic; that Roedean of drying out where America's stars Hoover their own bedrooms and relearn the skill of taking nourishment through the mouth instead of the nose. Minnelli reportedly checked in to overcome an addiction to tranquillisers, which she had been taking since her mother's suicide in 1969. Oh, and no questions, please, about her third marriage, to the sculptor Mark Gero, rumoured to he foundering.

Which leaves us with Stepping Out, adapted from the British stage hit by Richard Harris. "It was a warm film to make," she enthuses, "an extraordinary experience. Any time you take a gamble, especially with other people, it bonds you to them, and becomes a team effort."

Minnelli plays Mavis, a dancer fallen on hard times and reduced to giving tap lesson, it a church hall in Buffalo, New York. Her eight pupils are an ordinary bunch of no-hopers, but they are transformed when Mavis begins to coach them for a local charity event.

With something to strive for, each character reveals a heartrending personal story. Everyone has a little scene in which they swallow a lot, pause a lot, and produce quarts of those snotless tears peculiar to celluloid. The incomparable Julie Walters, playing a fanatically houseproud Brit, is so funny that she nearly does a Dick Turpin with the whole picture. But Minnelli's wistful charm is the glue that holds the fragmented plot in place. It is a very appealing performance, which should exorcise the memory of the film flops (Arthur 2, Rent-a-Cop) which have been Minnelli's lot since Cabaret.

"Mavis is the most vibrant film role that I've gotten for some time," she says. "But in order to play a vibrant role, you have to be offered it. Recently, they seem to have stopped making the kind of film I can do better than anyone else. There haven't been a lot of musicals. Now there seems to be a new age dawning for the film musical. Everyone is talking about it, though I've no idea what shape it will take."

Dancing her socks off and belting out a show-shopping number are what Minnelli does better than anyone else, and she gets a chance to do both in Stepping Out. The title song was written specially for her by Kander and Ebb, the composers of Cabaret.

"The whole thing was a team effort," she says. "You should have seen all of us at the tap-dancing rehearsals - it was just like what happens on the screen. We danced eight hours a day." Out comes the famous gurgling Minnelli laugh. "Tap is the happiest form of dance, and the funniest. You laugh while you're doing it, because you're making so much noise."

Despite the yawning gap in status between herself and the luckless Mavis, Minnelli insists that she felt a strong affinity with the role. "I understood her completely. She is such a romantic. She has this bad relationship, and I think a lot of women find themselves in that situation, smothering a part of themselves. When that part comes alive again, because it is needed by other people, they get the courage to leave that relationship behind. You always look for a role where there is growth. Making the film taught me a great deal about myself. It reinforced a belief I have in patience."

Afraid of straying into territory that might be interpreted as personal, she adds: "And it really reinforced my belief that what somebody can't do alone, they can do with a group of people." Which could have been lifted straight from the film's publicity hand-out. Cagey, and diffident, on pins and needles of nervous energy, Minnelli knows how to hide behind a string of benign cliches. "That kind of support was really what the film was all about," she continues. "And it affected our off-screen relationships. As we grew closer to filming, the cast would start to ask my advice about things, and I'd try to help them. I was playing a teacher, and I enjoyed finding the teacher in myself."

It brought out a side of her character which surprised her. "I realised it came from my father. When I saw myself in the rushes, I saw a lot of him in what I was doing, just as I remember him on the set - his attitude of keeping it light, but being determined to get it right. He wanted what he wanted."

As a small child, Minnelli used to race home from school, to watch her parents working at the MGM studios. The experience gave her an early insight into the realities of a professional showbusiness career. "I have been asked to direct, but it's such a massive job, my God. Maybe I've been put off by watching my father as a child - it was so boring to see everything being done over and over again."

Like her mother, Minnelli prefers being in front of the footlights, and admits to getting a strong charge from a live audience. Her remarkable troika of talents - singing, dancing and acting - first hit the stage when she was only 16. "I didn't make any conscious decision to become an all-round entertainer. I enjoyed all the different aspects of performing, I guess. But right from the beginning, I wanted to be a dancer."

Not surprisingly, she was eager to carve out her own niche and to separate herself from the Garland mythology. "Singing was the last thing on my mind. But I had to be able to do it, to get a job on Broadway, which was where I wanted to be. I'm still constantly unsatisfied with the way I sound."

Is she a perfectionist? "Yes, I am." She laughs ruefully. "It's a bore. But I believe in collaboration, and in being with people who know more than I do. I'll go to the ends of the earth to find them - though usually, I don't have to go that far. I'm sure there are a couple of people in this hotel right now who could teach me something."

True pro that she is, Minnelli knows the importance of strong back-up, and spends much of her working life seeking out people who can give her new ideas. "I have a quieter side, a learning side," she says, "which not many people know is there. Everybody tends to celebrate the upfront, showbusiness side, but you can't have that without a side that learns and takes in."

In 1989, she proved her protean adaptability by making an album, Results, with top rock stars the Pet Shop Boys, who are devoted fans. The single, Losing My Mind, climbed to the top of the charts. And she has incorporated her philosophy of linking up with the expertise of others into her stage show, which broke all records at New York's Radio City Music Hall earlier this year.

"My show is very dance-centred. And in a way, it was partly inspired by Stepping Out. I do the whole first act alone. Then, in the second act, I have a woman standing up in the audience, who says: 'You keep complaining about being alone up there, and you don't have to be.' So she comes up on the stage to dance with me. Then more and more women join in, until there are 12 of them - all different ages, sizes and races; all wonderfully talented."

This is very much in the post-Chorus Line Broadway tradition - the performer as blessed martyr, buckets of sentiment, and the audience cheering as ordinary people hitch their wagons to a star. Others have been there (remember Shirley MacLaine's cringe-making solo show in the late 1970s?) and come up dripping with ick. Minnelli, thanks to her manic energy and boundless determination to amuse at all costs, can carry it. She is looking forward to giving the dear old Albert Hall a shot of that raw energy, when she brings her show to London in October.

"I love being on stage. In that respect, I think my career is very European. A British artist will always go back to the theatre, and I believe in that. In the US, if you happen to start out doing television, that's what you end up doing for the rest of your life. Variety is more challenging for the artist."

Altogether, Minnelli is riding high at the moment, finally putting the lid on the rumours that have been consigning her to oblivion since her spell in the Betty Ford Clinic. Even her success with the Pet Shop Boys did not entirely discourage the gossip-mongers, who wanted to portray her as a boozy has-been. Now, with a fresh New York triumph under her belt, she can afford to shrug off tall stories about her supposed excesses. "Sure, my weight went up to about 150lb at one time. It happens when you stop smoking. But that only lasted for about 20 minutes. Thanks to all the dancing at Radio City, I'm in better shape now than when I did Cabaret."

The word 'comeback' makes her snort with laughter. "You take a vacation these days, and you're making a comeback. Where am I meant to have been? I think the mythology springs from people's desire to dramatise an undramatic situation. They feel they have to make it all more interesting. But it's the work that really counts."

Hollywood's Crown Princess is raring to blast us out of our seats all over again - if ever she was sitting alone in her room, she is now out where the music plays. "When your work is also your hobby, it makes a difference. It has to be fun, in the end. If it's not fun, I don't want to do it."

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