Liza Minnelli's Family: All About Her Famous Parents and 3 Siblings

Liza Minnelli was born into Hollywood royalty and became a star

The story of Liza Minnelli's rise to fame started the day she was born: the daughter of The Wizard of Oz star Judy Garland and acclaimed director Vincente Minnelli, Liza grew up in the spotlight, with her half-siblings Lorna Luft, Joey Luft and Christiane Nina Minnelli.

By the time she was 19, in 1965, Liza had already won a Tony Award. After an Oscar in 1972, a Tony in 1973 and a Grammy in 1990, she became one of only 24 people to achieve an EGOT for winning each award. (Liza also won two more Tonys and three Golden Globes.)

Her childhood, though, was challenging. Liza’s parents separated when she was only 6, and her mother’s well-known issues with addiction and mental health and struggles in her later career meant that Liza and her siblings lived an unconventional and sometimes unstable life. Garland died on June 22, 1969, of an overdose of barbiturates. At the time of their mother’s death, Liza was 23, Lorna was 16 and Joey was 14.

While Liza and Lorna have lived more in the public eye and have spoken in depth about their childhoods in interviews, Joey has been more reluctant. “I don’t want to talk about the bad things,” Joey told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “That isn’t what my mom was about. She was a performer. She was a mother. She loved people. She was the most caring person. She had the greatest sense of humor.”

Related: Liza Minnelli's Life in Photos, from Performing with Mom Judy Garland to Earning an EGOT

The hardest part of establishing her career, Liza told Variety in 2020, was "was getting to be known as myself as opposed to somebody's daughter."

Even now, Liza says that she still feels her mother’s spirit with her all the time. She even wore ruby slipper-inspired heels for her second wedding to actor Jack Haley Jr., whose father played the Tin Man in the 1939 film. “When I call on her, she’s there, and I call on her a lot,” she told Variety. “She’ll say, ‘Ignore it’ a lot. She’ll say, ‘It’s one opinion. Who cares? Just keep going.’ ”

Read on to learn more about Liza Minnelli’s famous family.

Her parents met on a movie set

Garland was already a superstar when she signed on to act in Meet Me In St. Louis, the 1944 Christmas movie musical that debuted the holiday classic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Up-and-coming director Vincente helmed the film, which began shooting in 1943 and was released in 1944.

The couple had previously met in 1940, when Vincente worked briefly on a sequence in another movie Garland was starring in, but didn’t strike up a romance until later. They married on June 15, 1945, shortly after Garland’s first marriage to composer David Rose ended. Their only daughter, Liza, was born March 12, 1946. Garland and Vincente divorced in 1951.

Garland had two kids with her third husband Sid Luft

As soon as her divorce from Vincente was finalized, Garland married producer Sid Luft. They had two children together: daughter Lorna was born on Nov. 21, 1952, and son Joey arrived on March 29, 1955.

In 2022, Lorna described what their childhood home was like to Entertainment Tonight. Once, she said, she woke up to find Marilyn Monroe sitting on her bed, checking to make sure the girl was OK.  "I know this is going to sound strange, but I've said it so many times, it was our normal,” Lorna explained. “We didn't know they were famous; we didn't know they were different. They were our parents' friends. That was the neighborhood."

Garland and Luft divorced in 1965, and the actress went on to marry two more times: to actor Mark Herron from 1965 to 1967, and to musician Mickey Deans in 1969, just three months before her death.

Liza's father Vincente remarried three times, and had another daughter

Vincente married Georgette Magnani in 1954. On May 20, 1955, the couple welcomed Christiane Nina Minnelli. They divorced in 1958. He was married to Danica de Gigante from 1962 to 1971. His final marriage to Margaretta Lee Anderson lasted from 1980 until his death on July 25, 1986.

Christiane stays out of the spotlight

Christiane didn’t follow in the rest of her family’s Hollywood footsteps and has stayed out of the spotlight.

In a 2008 interview with The Guardian, Liza said that she was about to travel to Mexico to see her sister. "My father used to call her Tina Nina,” she said. “She's wonderful."

Liza and her family members have collaborated on work many times

Garland involved her children in showbusiness almost from infancy. Liza’s first movie appearance was at age 3, in the final scene of her mother’s 1949 film Good Old Summertime. In 1959, at age 13, Liza sang and danced with Gene Kelly on his television special. By the 1960s, Liza often performed with her mother on The Judy Garland Show and, in 1964, during concerts in London that were later released as an album.

In 1976, Liza went to Rome to film A Matter of Time with her father, who was directing the movie, which would be his final film.

Lorna’s first performance was also on The Judy Garland Show, when at age 11 in 1963, she performed “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” She also performed with her brother at her mother’s 1967 shows at the Palace Theater on Broadway.

Joey also appeared in Garland’s final film, I Could Go on Singing. As an adult, though, he has mostly chosen to stay out of the limelight, working as a photographer and on film sets. In 2014, Joey returned to the stage with his show “A Judy Garland Concert with Joey Luft.” In the show, he plays clips of his mother singing some of her most iconic songs like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and intersperses personal stories about what was happening behind the scenes.

“It’s just so fun just getting out there and talking about her and letting people know, ‘Here’s what really happened,’ ” he said in 2014, per the Los Angeles Times.

When Lorna was releasing a rock album in 1980, Liza talked to PEOPLE about the pressures of their family legacy. “When your mother was the greatest, I mean, it was a little heavy,” Liza said. “Lorna has to deal with that and with me.”

In 2016, on the anniversary of her mother’s death and just days after the mass shooting at Orlando gay club Pulse, Lorna performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for the first time.

“I’ve never sung this song,” she said before the performance. “Not because it was too hard for me emotionally, but because I always felt you can’t improve on perfect. But I thought to myself, if I’m ever going to sing this, now is the time ... We’ve all been so hit by what happened in Orlando. And I wanted to find a song that sort of said what we hope for, and a song about hope and a song about love.”

Liza lived in the Plaza Hotel as a young girl, and inspired Eloise

Garland’s best friend and Liza’s godmother, Kay Thompson, wrote the popular Eloise book series. It’s widely believed that Liza's time as a young girl alone in hotels, like at The Plaza in New York where Garland, Liza and the fictional Eloise all lived for a time, inspired the character. Liza’s interpretation of Eloise, she told The Guardian in 2008, is that she’s "a kid, alone, in this huge hotel and she found ways to entertain herself. It is not a children's book — it's for adults."

Liza, Lorna and Joey remember their mother for her sense of humor

While there are many stories about their mother’s struggles, all three of Garland’s kids focus on happy memories of their lives with her. “I adored her as a mother because that’s what she was,” Joey told Mike Wallace in 1974. “There were rough times and there were good times, and mostly what I remember are the good times.”

Lora echoed similar sentiments to Entertainment Tonight in 2022, "She had tragedies, but she was not tragic, and she didn't pass it on to us. Our mom had such an extraordinary sense of humor, and that was her survival guide. That is what I can tell you has been my lifeline is to find the funny — just find the funny. And we do, we just find the funny because I think that is the way that we were raised and brought up and we watched a woman who found the funny."

Liza and her siblings haven’t always been close

Both Liza and Lorna have been open about their past struggles with addiction, and have also butted heads in their careers — but they’ve always been clear that there’s a lot of love between them, even in challenging times, like during their estrangement in the 1990s.

In 1998, Lorna spoke to PEOPLE about her time in rehab, and how it affected her relationship with herself and her mother. “The most important thing I realized at the Ford Center,” she said, “was how to forgive ... You realize it is not your fault. It wasn’t her fault. In the end, none of us had the strength to help her.”

"My sister and I will always find our way back to one another, no matter what comes into being," Lorna said in a 2017 television interview with Studio 10. "I think that’s the way with all families. Our family's just a little strange because it's under a microscope."

In June 2022, to mark what would have been Garland’s 100th birthday, Liza and Lorna collaborated on a perfume called Judy. “It smells like Mama,” Liza told PEOPLE at the time.

“I wanted the fragrance to be as inclusive as she was; this is why we made it unisex,” Lorna said in the same interview. “I also wanted to capture what my mother wore so that every person wearing it would feel her warmth."

Garland's children moved her remains to a family crypt in 2017

Garland was originally buried in New York, but her kids had her remains moved to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles in 2017. “The move to Hollywood was made after many years of family consultations and deliberations,” Hollywood Forever spokesperson Noelle Berman told the Associated Press. “Ms. Garland’s three children now reside in Southern California and wished to have their mother resting near them.”

Her remains are now in a gated mausoleum room called the Judy Garland Pavilion, where there is space for the rest of the family. “When Judy Garland died, her affairs were controlled by her husband, Mickey Deans,” Berman added. “Her children had no say in the matter of her burial, so this is at last their opportunity to do what they feel their mother would have wanted in the first place — to be united with her family in Hollywood.”

Garland’s life was memorialized in Judy 

The 2019 biopic depicted the final years of Garland’s life, when she was at her lowest point mentally, physically and financially — but she could still fill theaters full of fans eagerly waiting for her return, as she did in the 1969 London shows depicted in the film. Renée Zellweger won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the star.

However, despite the movie's success, Liza and Lorna were vocal about not wanting to see the film.

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