The production was extended and difficult. Garland’s health problems created scheduling challenges that added significantly to the production’s costs and extended its timeline. But she completed the film, and the result was a performance of genuine greatness. The film’s premiere in September 1954 generated enthusiastic critical response, and her Oscar nomination for Best Actress — she was not the winner; Grace Kelly took the award for The Country Girl — was widely regarded as the correct recognition of the film’s quality.
What A Star Is Born could not do was repair the financial picture that had been building around her career. The film was expensive to produce, its extended production had further inflated those costs, and the cuts that Warner Bros. made to its running time after its initial screenings — reportedly reducing it by about thirty minutes — affected both its critical reception and its commercial performance. Garland did not receive the profits she had anticipated from the Transcona arrangement. The financial situation that had been a problem since the end of her MGM contract remained a problem after the film.
She received a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for A Star Is Born in 1955. It was a concrete professional recognition at a moment when other structures of her professional life were still uncertain.
The years after A Star Is Born were marked by the continuing tension between her extraordinary performing ability and the personal and financial difficulties that accompanied it. She made Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, playing a German witness in Stanley Kramer’s film about the Nuremberg trials. Her performance — in a dramatic role entirely different from anything associated with her musical image — earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. It was evidence that the range of her ability extended well beyond what her public image, built on Oz and on the concert stage, might have suggested.