Happy birthday Liza Minnelli! Five reasons why we love her

Happy birthday, Liza Minnelli! The entertainment icon and true survivor turns 69 today, so we thought we’d celebrate with five reasons why we love us some Liza:

1. The entire Results album, but particularly this video:

Liza Minelli – Don’t Drop Bombs by jpdc11

First off, Liza’s 1989 Pet Shop Boys-produced collection of stately dance pop is one of the very best albums of the 80s. FACT. But it’s the ultra-camp video for single Don’t Drop Bombs that we always return to: remember back when music videos had ACTING and EMOTION and INCONGRUOUS CHAIR DANCING? Those were the days. Hearing Liza almost-rap the lyrics “I know you carry on / Behind my back / With your secretary / You’ll have a heart attack!” is a pretty special moment too.

2. That time she went rogue on Home Shopping Network:

Bless her, Liza was recovering from knee surgery (as she reminds viewers more than once in the highlights video above), but still soldiered on with a live appearance on Home Shopping Network to hock her line of luxury smocks, pashminas and costume jewellery. Liza veers wildly off script as the poor host loses control of the situation: She bosses the models around, insists she devised the entire fashion line while ‘working with clay’ on her hospital bed, and even cockblocks the host’s attempts to sell the damn products (“How about two or three bracelets?” “No! One will do.”)

Our favourite moment? The caller who congratulates her on having “overcome so much diversity,” and pronounces Liza her “mentor”. Liza’s response? “You’re my mentor too, honey!”

3. Her brilliant comic turn as Lucille Austero on Arrested Development

Now to Liza being intentionally funny: It was an inspired bit of casting, enlisting her to play Bluth family matriarch Lucille’s best friend/arch nemesis (also named Lucille – or ‘Lucille 2’) on this brilliant comedy series. Lucille 2 had serious vertigo issues and a hopeless devotion to her frenemy’s youngest son, the Oedipal Buster Bluth. She returned for the show’s 2013 fourth season reboot, which wasn’t anywhere near as funny but at least gifted the world the unforgettable image of Liza Minnelli wrestling an ostrich:

4. Her shaky-but-ultimately-triumphant performance at Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary concert:

OK, there’s no getting around it: Liza’s vibrato-filled performance of MJ’s ballad You Are Not Alone at his 30th anniversary concert is painful listening. But consider this: After a serious case of viral encephalitis in 2000, doctors predicted that Liza would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair and would likely not even be able to speak again. Liza didn’t like the sound of that and, with the help of vocal and dance lessons, she was able to make her live comeback at this September 2001 concert. “I am stable as a table,” she told reporters at the event.

5. Finally…Sally Bowles. Just Sally Bowles.

It was the role that saw her finally escape from her mother’s shadow: Liza deservedly won an Academy Award for her star turn in the 1972 film adaptation of Cabaret. She’s vulnerable, sexy, funny, wounded – just watch her definitive performance of show-stopping ballad Maybe This Time:

LUV U LIZA.