Liza Minnelli

Liza Minnelli is an American singer, actress, and dancer whose six-decade career has produced one of only 19 EGOT-class performers in American entertainment history — winning the Emmy (1973), Grammy (1990 Grammy Legend Award), Oscar (1973 Best Actress for Cabaret), and Tony (1965, 1978, plus a 2009 special Tony Award) Awards. She was born Liza May Minnelli on March 12, 1946, in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Her father Vincente Minnelli was the American MGM film director (best known for An American in Paris 1951 and Gigi 1958, both of which won Best Picture Academy Awards), and her mother Judy Garland was the iconic American singer-and-actress (best known for her 1939 lead role as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz).

Her 1949 first film appearance — at age three — in her mother Judy Garland's MGM film In the Good Old Summertime launched her early-career American film engagement. Her education at the École Internationale de Genève in Switzerland (1962) and her brief 1962–1963 attendance at Sorbonne University in Paris launched her early-career path. Her 1963 Off-Broadway debut at age 17 in Best Foot Forward launched her early-1960s American Broadway career.

Her 1965 Broadway lead role as Flora Meszaros in John Kander and Fred Ebb's Flora the Red Menace — at age 19 — won her the 1965 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, making her the youngest Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award recipient at the time. Her 1972 lead role as American expatriate cabaret singer Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (the film adaptation of the 1966 Kander and Ebb Broadway musical) won her the 1973 Best Actress Academy Award.

Her 1977 Broadway revival lead role in Kander and Ebb's The Act (which won her the 1978 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical) and her subsequent 1981 lead role in Sidney Lumet's Arthur (opposite Dudley Moore) produced her late-1970s and early-1980s American Broadway-and-film public profile. Her later 1990s and 2000s career has been complicated by multiple addiction-rehab admissions and ongoing chronic-pain medical issues. She has been continuously cited by subsequent American Broadway-and-cabaret performers as a defining influence.

Her name Liza derives from the diminutive of Elizabeth (from the Hebrew Elisheva meaning "my God is my oath"). Liza was a popular American girls' name through the 1960s and 1970s.