Judy, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, written by Tom Edge and Peter Quilter, directed by Rupert Goold.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0012y9d/judy

The use of the singular name implies the universal. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Judy Garland arrives in swinging London for a number of sell-out performances in The Talk of the Town in the winter of 1968. Six months later she was dead at the age of 47.

Renee Zellweger is Judy, with a long chin, white butterfly masquerade mask of a face with bright red lips. Get the spiky black hair, but it’s the voice that counts. I’m no great fan of music, but The Wizard of Oz was on every Christmas of childhood. Judy inhabits our past. Her arrival in London was met with the nostalgic acclaim of virtual and digitally enhanced ABBA performing their medley of greatest hits. They didn’t put a foot wrong, but Judy was a drunken mess, which was part of the attraction. I winced as fans flung food at her.  

She joked she slept around five hours in her whole childhood. Uppers and downers, and a chaperone to make sure she didn’t eat. Drilled for eighteen hours a day. She was an asset when working. A liability to be watched over when not.  When a doctor in London examiners her and gives her another ‘vitamin’ injection, he proclaims her underweight, her response that he was flirting with her.

Inevitably, a side story of her tour involves a duo of male admirers who are homosexual. Judy gets married to a younger admirer, but the wedding cake lasts longer than the groom. She tells a talk-show host that she’s only Judy for an hour a night, when she’s performing. The other time, like everybody else, she’s a working mother of two children whom she loves and is poor old put-upon Lorna Luft (Bella Ramsey).

In a flashback, Judy/ Lorna Luft makes Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery) come out of his office and give the soon to be sixteen-year-old Judy a telling off. He puts his hand on her adolescent breast. He owns her is the message, which she would take heed to learn again and again.  

The rise and fall of Judy is the rise and fall of Renee Zellweger. I could take or leave the film, but Zellweger’s performance is one worth remembering. I don’t know if she won any awards for it (the film was made for BBC in 2019), but if not, she should have. Wow.