Columbo Villian of the Week
10 10 2007This week’s villian is the often imitated and never forgotten Liza Minnelli: star of stage, screen and enough car crash weddings to form a film in its own right.
The singer/actress was born to the stage. The daughter of cinematic legend Judy Garland she made her first film appearance at age three and let’s face it the combination of Garland’s personal life (she had Issues) with the crazy world of celebrity in the mid twentieth century meant that there was only one way Ms Minnelli was going to come out. And that’s a fruit cake. An entertaining one but a fruit cake none the less.
Anyone who doubts me can merely look at her marriage to David Gest (surely a future Columbo Villian of the week), her excessive use of plastic surgery (sweetheart you need to sue that surgeon) and her god awful appearances on Graham Norton.
On the subject of Gest this is one scenario when life really does imitate art and their marriage does read like a Columbo script:
The aging starlet, battered by years of celebrity excess and one failed marriage after another, finally finds love in the arms of a record producer- who cares if he knows all the words to Barbara Streisand’s songs? It doesn’t mean anything, right?
They’re married in a hail of celebrity pantomime and public good will. Then it all goes wrong. Gest turns out to be more Thing Of The Night than Order Of The Knight. Four divorces is too much, the tabloids are hounding her, it’s all too much. There’s only one way out:
She swaps his “medication” for something with a bit more kick.
Our star is used to playing the fragile, damaged by life eccentric and she uses this to perfection in her self styled role as widower. All is going well and she’ll be scot free if she can just get that dirty little detective to stop getting her to sign things for his wife. Hell she’ll meet his wife it’ll shut him up and doesn’t he know cigars are bad for a singer’s throat.
Next week: A maligned Z lister takes revenge on his B list co-star.
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I like her!
It’s just a bit of fun. I’m not being nasty - hell if she had killed Gest she would have done us all a favour.
In Gest a more pointless, poisonous individual never did draw breath.
Liza is ok, she’d just make a fab villian.
yeh I agree with that
Did you hear the guest vocal she did on Mama by My Chemical Romance? Sounds like a deranged organ-grinder’s monkey. It’s fantastic!