When Hollywood historian David Fantle and his friend and writing partner Tom Johnson walked into Vincente Minnelli’s house in 1980, it looked to them like “silent screen siren Norma Desmond’s decaying brick pile from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard,” Fantle recalled.
Mariclare Costello, Actress in ‘The Waltons’ and ‘Let’s Scare Jessica to Death,’ Dies at 90
The Oscar-winning director told them that his not-yet-wife Judy Garland didn’t want to star for him in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); she was after “more sophisticated parts” and feared it would “set her career back 20 years.” The film, of course, would become a classic musical and one of Garland’s most beloved movies…