The film Judy tracks the final year of Judy Garland’s life, the quintessential cautionary tale of child stardom. The list of tragic names since suggest things have not improved much – although some directors are trying
Judy Garland was a walking ghost story. Watch footage of the patron saint of child stars from any time after The Wizard of Oz, made when she was 16, and you see a woman haunted by the girl she never had a chance to be. How that haunting ended is the subject of a new movie, Judy, starring Renée Zellweger as Garland in 1969, middle-aged in
London, broke and addicted. She was doomed long before then. The details – an adolescent starlet destroyed by studio executives – remain less ghost story than horror movie.
For generations, Garland has been a cautionary tale for kids who might venture on to the big screen. But the comfort of Judy, in theory at least, is that of a story safely in the past. How terrible the old times were; how long ago it was. Well, maybe. This summer,
BBC aired the mini-series Dark Money, concerning a 13-year-old
British actor abused by a
Hollywood producer. The message came as a jolt, the suggestion of a film business that feeds on the young.