Judy Garland's daughter Lorna Luft stepped out of her shadow to embrace family legacy

Judy Garland's youngest daughter Lorna Luft, who begins a run of dates in London's Crazy Coqs tonight (June 26) has always been upfront about the difficulties of being "Judy Garland's daughter". The 71-year-old entertainer called her 1998 autobiography Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, a reference to one of her mother's most famous songs but also to living in the shadow of her legendary Hollywood star mother whose 1939 performance in the Wizard Of Oz remains much loved.

Indeed, when the book was adapted into an Emmy-winning mini-series, starring Judy Davis as the iconic entertainer, it ended when Lorna was just 16 and mourning the death of her mother. This is despite the fact the tome brought readers right up to date with Lorna's life at the time.

Lorna, whose father is Judy's third husband Sid Luft, has followed her mother into the entertainment industry, just like her sister Liza Minnelli.

In the book she describes her life as a "melodrama" and says she was "born into the cast" and that was literally true of her early performances. Her debut was actually on the Christmas special of her mother's eponymous TV show in 1963 when she was just 11-years-old.

"Being able to sing with her and being able to watch her work as not just my mom was special," she recalled in an interview with msn.com in 2023. "A lot of people watch the show [at Christmas] and I think it's lovely," she said. "I'm very, very grateful."

Despite this Lorna found it hard to find her own place in a business that her mother had made such a mark on. "I think it's really hard to make your own footsteps in the sand and so I ran away from it for a very, very long time," she told BBC Breakfast in 2015. "Because I didn't know how to handle it. Because no one was there to teach me.

"There's no book that you check out of the library 'how to be a legend's child'. So I didn't really know how to do that. So I dyed my hair purple and I sang on Blondie records, that was fun, and I sang rock and roll and I did everything until I said I think I need to sit down and investigate my heritage," she admitted.

Before she got to grips with her mother's legacy she spent years trying to figure out her place in the world. "If there was a tiny word in any song that had the word 'rainbow,' I didn't want anything to do with it. I'd run for the hills," she told Australian TV show Studio 10 in 2017.

The mum of two and grandmother of four made her Broadway debut in the play Promises Promise in 1971 when she was just 19. She then went on to appear in movies, perhaps most famously Grease 2, and also landed a regular TV role playing a nurse on the 1980s series Trapper John, M.D. for a season.

But her mother's shadow always loomed large - including her addictions. Lorna has been very open about her own issues with substance abuse and recalled an encounter in the infamous nightclub Studio 54 in New York City.

“We were doing cocaine, we were doing all sorts of things,” said Luft. “And I think, I’ll never forget, somebody came up to me and said, ‘Do you not think that you’re doing the same thing that your mom did?’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. She had a problem. I only do it at night… stupid."

By her own admission, Lorna got "sick and tired of feeling sick and tired" and went to rehab as she wanted to start a family and she began to ponder her family's legacy.

This led to a complete about-turn as she threw herself into promoting her mother's life and work. Along with the book she embraced her mother's back catalogue - including songs with the word rainbow in them.

In December 1995, she released a cover version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, which was reworked as a "virtual duet" with her mother. In 2005 she hit the road with an acclaimed show called Songs My Mother Taught Me. An album with the same name, produced by Barry Manilow along with Lorna's husband Colin Freeman, was released in 2007. As the title suggests it was comprised of some of her mother's beloved tunes.

She has also toured the UK with Judy - The Songbook of Judy Garland, a show highlighting her mother's life and music, which featured her signature songs and recreations of film scenes from her MGM years.

She is a regular visitor to UK shores to perform in theatre productions and for her annual concert tours but even when she is working on a non Judy Garland-related project, her mother is never far from her mind.

"It's a responsibility," she told BBC Breakfast. "There's a legacy there that I keep very, very, very, intact and I'm very protective of it. I'm very protective of her films, I'm very protective of her name and likeness and I want it to be shown in a proper light because that's what she would have wanted."