To Judy, From Fans and Family With Love

ABC’s moving “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows” tears away the myths surrounding the legendary performer who starred in such film classics as “The Wizard of Oz,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “A Star Is Born.”

“‘Everybody would love to make a story about and exploit her chemical and alcohol dependency,” says her daughter Lorna Luft, on whose book the four-hour drama is based.

“That’s not the story,” says Luft, who is co-executive producer. “The story of this movie is about choice and how my children and I were given a choice, but how she wasn’t. I know she would be really proud of it.”

Directed by co-executive producer Robert Allan Ackerman, “Life With Judy Garland,” which airs Sunday and Monday, stars Australian actress Judy Davis as the adult Garland and newcomer Tammy Blanchard as the young Judy. The drama chronicles Garland’s troublesome, tumultuous life from her first stage performance at age 2 to her death from a drug overdose at age 47 in 1969.

Victor Garber plays Sid Luft, Garland’s third husband and father of her children Lorna and Joey; Hugh Laurie is second husband Vincente Minnelli, who directed her in “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “The Pirate” and was the father of her first child, Liza; John Benjamin Hickey plays her singing coach, Roger Edens; the late Al Waxman is the demanding MGM chief Louis B. Mayer; and Marsha Mason portrays Garland’s overbearing, stern mother, Ethel Gumm.

“Life With Judy Garland,” says Luft, was done with a lot of respect and love. “I did it as a daughter, and for everyone else [involved], they did it as fans. I wanted this movie to happen more than life. I wanted it more than the air I breathe. It was saying thank you to everything she left me.”

Executive producer Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (“Annie,” “Cinderella”) wanted the film to show that despite the ups and downs in her life, Garland was a devoted mother to her three children.

“We wanted it to be a family movie,” says Zadan, who has been friends with Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft for years. “We wanted it to be a family saga. We didn’t want it to be a biopic of Judy Garland. That’s why it’s told from Lorna’s point of view.”

“What the movie tries to do is make people understand why she had all of these things happen to her,” adds Meron. “And to be able to explain in contemporary terms the drug abuse and the emotional abuse she suffered from her mother and the studio, so we can sympathize with her plight.”

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Ackerman, who saw Garland perform at Carnegie Hall 40 years ago, says that people think they know her story. “The reaction I have had from talking to people and people who have seen the film is they are very interested in finding out that she herself really did many times try to change her life. She was constantly in this kind of battle against drugs and working so hard that she was always trying somehow to get out of this kind of well she had sunk into. That sort of surprises people. They have this image of her as somebody who got caught up in a druggie life.”

The director elicits an amazing performance from Blanchard, who is a dead ringer for the young Garland. But it is Davis who is a revelation as Garland, at times seeming to channel the performer.

“It was amazing because you would come onto the set and when you were talking to Judy [Davis] it was scary,” recalls Ackerman. “She looked just like [Garland] so much. It was really incredible.”

Davis, says Luft, watched all of her mother’s movies and TV appearances, and listened to her tapes and records. “She just sort of went into Garland-land,” says Luft, who was 16 when her mother died.

“We read every book and read all the biographies that we thought were credible,” Ackerman adds. “There was a lot of discussion. We wanted to get it right. We felt an incredible debt to Judy Garland to do it correctly.”

“My intention was to do her as much justice as I could because she was phenomenally talented,” says Davis, an Oscar nominee for “A Passage to India” and “Husbands and Wives.”

“I felt honored to be asked to do it. Ultimately, I had to bring her to life.”

Davis embodies Garland when she re-creates her legendary concerts at the Palace Theater and Carnegie Hall. Though the film uses Garland’s recordings, Ackerman asked Davis to sing during the performance sequences.

“She’s quite hard to sing along with because, obviously, you have to follow her breathing patterns,” Davis says. “She had an incredible supply of breath. She was only 4 feet, 11 inches, but had massive breath.”

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Though Davis has played real people before--most notably writer Lillian Hellman in the 1999 telefilm “Dash and Lilly”--she acknowledges she’s never had a role like this.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she says. “I really did fall in love with her and was trying to be as honest as I could be. I think she would have liked that.”

“Life With Judy Garland” was shot in about 45 days. Davis had more than 93 costume changes. She says playing a character she loved made it easier to survive the grueling, long hours. “It was always just wonderful.”

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Davis also felt an emotional connection to Garland. “She’s not difficult to connect with, of course, particularly because I am an actress too,” says Davis. “I didn’t realize before I started working on it what a brilliant actress she was. I think maybe she’s a little underestimated there.”

Ackerman was thrilled to re-create scenes from such Garland films as “The Wizard of Oz,” “Meet Me In St. Louis” and “A Star Is Born.”

“It was really fun,” says Ackerman. “The movie was a lot of hard work--all of those wigs, the costumes and the sets and time periods. But it was the most fun when we were re-creating the movies. It was really always kind of shocking to me to take a look on the set and see something that was such a familiar image. When the actors would come out and get on the set, and Judy [Davis] would come in and she would be in a costume that was so familiar, it was really extraordinary. It was a kind of fantasy.”

“I had never seen Judy Garland live, but to be there when Judy Davis was doing Carnegie Hall,” says Meron. “I now feel I have been to Carnegie Hall.”

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Freelance writer Christine Spines contributed to this story.

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* “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with a special advisory for coarse language).