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William Shatner Reveals Why He Was ‘Disappointed’ Seeing Judy Garland Live as a Teen
William Shatner was a fan of Judy Garland long before they worked together on an Oscar-winning movie — and witnessed her struggle with addiction firsthand.
The Star Trek actor, 94, spoke with Entertainment Weekly about first seeing the legendary Wizard of Oz actress, who died of an accidental drug overdose at age 47 in 1969, on a family trip.
“As a teenager from Montreal, every so often I’d go down with my parents to New York and go to the theater,” he told EW for a story published on Monday, February 16. “And I saw her on stage in Times Square doing a concert — but she was drunk.”
“I kept looking at her thinking, ‘My God, she’s my heroine. And I think she’s drunk.’ I was a teenager,” he continued. “I thought, ‘Why, she can’t possibly be drunk on stage!’ And, well, she was, and made no sense. And I was so disappointed.”
Still, the actor was excited to work with her filming Stanley Kramer‘s Oscar-winning drama, Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, in which he played Army Captain Harrison Byers and Garland had a brief but dramatic part as a German woman forced to testify about her alleged romantic relationship with a Jewish merchant.
He described thinking she was “very fragile” at the time.
“She was an enormous talent. And when she came on to do her scene, I hadn’t seen anything of her since that experience so many years ago,” he said. “There she was, doing her fragile bit. And it was part of a continuity that I treasure.”
Garland would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Judgment at Nuremberg.
