Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli in 1944, was both a significant commercial success and the beginning of Garland’s relationship with the man who became her second husband. Minnelli’s approach to the material — a period family story anchored in specific evocations of domestic American life — gave Garland scope to perform in ways that went beyond the girl-singer-in-fancy-costumes quality that had characterized some of her earlier work. Her performance in “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” demonstrated a vocal and emotional range that critics and audiences recognized. She and Minnelli married in June 1945; their daughter, Liza, was born in March 1946.
The marriage to Minnelli brought domestic change and professional continuity. She was still under contract, still being scheduled, still being managed. But she was also becoming, in these years, more assertive about her artistic preferences and more aware of the gap between what the studio wanted from her and what she felt capable of giving. The physical costs of the preceding years were becoming harder to conceal or dismiss. She was dealing with the accumulated effects of a decade of pharmaceutical management, inadequate rest, and nutritional restriction that had begun when she was a child.
By 1947, the strain was visible in the production record. The Pirate, which began filming that year with Minnelli directing, was marked by Garland’s extended absences, hospitalizations, and what the production records described as instability. She was experiencing what biographers have characterized as a nervous breakdown — a term that covered, in the usage of the period, a range of conditions from severe depression to psychotic episodes to the effects of drug dependency. She was sent to a psychiatric facility during this period. She attempted suicide, according to multiple accounts.