80 years later, The Wizard of Ozremains one of the most beloved movies of all time. It was also a huge cinematic achievement at the time; it wasn’t the first feature-length movie ever filmed in color, but it was certainly the first one to happen on such a large scale.
Behind the scenes, however, it was a different story. Garland — along with other cast and crew members — faced lots of personal problems throughout the production.
Judy Garland’s history of body image issues
The Wizard of Oz would be nothing without Judy Garland’s iconic red-haired character Dorothy Gale.
In the past few decades, fans have witnessed the negative effects of childhood stardom on child stars. Beloved entertainers such as Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Lindsay Lohan have gone through personal turmoil in the public eye, and have each worked hard to recover from how child stardom affected them.
Judy Garland was arguably the first one of these celebrities to experience the same phenomenon. Garland and her sisters were vaudeville entertainers from a young age — she was just 2 years old when she was first on stage — and she was eventually scouted by MGM Studios at just 13 years old.
Her age and her size proved to be a problem for the mega-movie studio, however. She stood at less than five feet tall, and her cutesy girl-next-door persona didn’t fit will with the more mature roles. According to the 1975 biography Judy, when Garland played younger characters (including Dorothy), she had to wear caps on her teeth and prosthetics on her nose.
Garland continued to develop body image issues as a result of how she was handled in the industry at such a young age.
According to the book The Golden Girls of MGM, studio chief Louis Meyer referred to her as his “little hunchback.” Charles Walters, who directed Garland in several movies later in her life, knew that her problems were a result of how she was treated. “She was the ugly duckling,” he said in the 1972 film Judy: Impressions of Garland. “I think it had a very damaging effect on her emotionally for a long time. I think it lasted forever, really.”
Judy Garland faced harsh treatment on the set of ‘The Wizard of Oz’
While The Wizard of Oz is Garland’s most beloved movie, that doesn’t mean it was a lovely experience for her filming it. Throughout her early career, studio executives closely monitored her weight to make sure she kept her girlish figure. Sadly, Garland was already used to being manipulated with medication, as her mother gave her various pills starting at 10 years old. They were used to give her the energy she needed to perform and then to help her sleep.
Meyer continued allowing drugs to control Garland’s weight, TV Over Mind reported. On top of that, he forbade her from eating or drinking anything but chicken soup and black coffee. She was even forced to smoke up to 80 cigarettes a day to suppress her appetite.
Judy Garland had a dangerous process of becoming Dorothy
In addition to being under a strict diet and pill regimen while filming The Wizard of Oz, Garland had to hurt herself physically for the role as well as medically. Biography.com reported on Garland’s not-so-magical experience filming the iconic movie.
To make sure she maintained a svelte figure and evoked what the “perfect” girl-next-door was supposed to look like, Garland was forced to wear tight corsets while filming and tape down her breasts.While Garland enjoyed a successful career after The Wizard of Oz, her personal demons eventually became her downfall. She died at just 47 years old, and her legacy lives on today through her daughter Liza Minelli.
Although producers Arthur Freed and Mervyn LeRoy had wanted to cast her in the role from the beginning, studio chief Mayer first tried to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century Fox, but they declined.Deanna Durbin was then asked, but was unavailable; this resulted in Garland being cast.
On the set of "The Wizard of Oz," the cast was sprayed down with white asbestos flakes. Asbestos, a cancer-causing carcinogen, was in common use in buildings and in consumer products in the 1930s.
As conceived and written by Lyman Frank Baum in 1900, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was a political allegory of turn-of-the-century America. Written in the waning days of the Populist movement of the late 1800s, it was the story of the sad collapse of Populism and the issues upon which the movement was based.
Baum never states Dorothy's age, but he does write in The Lost Princess of Oz that she is a year younger than Betsy Bobbin and a year older than Trot, whose age was specified as 10 in Ruth Plumly Thompson's The Giant Horse of Oz, putting her at age 11 by the time she comes to live in Oz.
Most of the Munchkins were in fact dwarfs. They came from a group directed by Leo Singer and his Singer Midgets. There were 124 of them that came from that group and about a dozen or so child actors filled in the crowd.
The Hollywood Forever cemetery, the final resting place of stars such as Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Burt Reynolds, is now a historic-cultural monument.
She had suffered from hepatitis, exhaustion, kidney ailments, nervous breakdowns, near-fatal drug reactions, overweight, underweight and injuries suffered in falls. Her previous four marriages had ended in divorce and her life was a chaos of unhappy love affairs.
So the hairstyle we see Judy wear in The Wizard of Oz. is actually not a full wig. It was a 3/4 length wig, much like a partial wig. or extensions. that could be blended in with her natural hair.
Today it's hard to imagine "Wizard of Oz" protagonist Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland) any other way than with brown hair in braids and minimal makeup. But early on, the movie's production staff put Garland in a long blonde wig and heavy makeup, with defined eyebrows and lots of blush and lipstick.
The cast and crew, especially Judy Garland, suffered extreme stress during production. The film had serious on-set injuries, including Buddy Ebsen being poisoned by aluminum dust and Margaret Hamilton catching on fire during a scene, highlighting the difficulties faced in creating the iconic special effects.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) was no exception. In fact, there were a fair number of problems that occurred during the making of the film. Whilst nobody suffered any long-lasting injuries, several performers experienced painful incidents on set, ranging from nasty reactions to painful burns and even slaps in the face.
The pipe, fitted to look like a broomstick, exploded during filming, sending Danko to the hospital for 11 days and scarring her legs permanently. Additionally, Margaret Hamilton's copper-based makeup was highly toxic and her green complexion took months to fade.
The cast and crew, especially Judy Garland, suffered extreme stress during production. The film had serious on-set injuries, including Buddy Ebsen being poisoned by aluminum dust and Margaret Hamilton catching on fire during a scene, highlighting the difficulties faced in creating the iconic special effects.
Sadly, all the vastly talented leads for the famous 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz have passed into eternity, however, if they were alive today, here are their ages (as of July 2022) … Judy Garland, Dorothy Gale would be 99 years old today. (Age 16 when she played the role, she passed at the age of 47 in 1969).
But she seared a fearsome image on the public consciousness in 1939 when, at the age of 36, she played the Wicked Witch, the terror of Judy Garland's long dream in the classic film of L. Frank Baum's story.
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