A Star Is Born is not a nostalgia piece. It is a serious film about serious material, made by serious people, and Garland’s performance in it is technically and emotionally among the best in her filmography. “The Man That Got Away” — filmed in a single extended take for much of its length, with Garland moving through the space of the set as Cukor held his camera — is a demonstration of what she could do when given the material and the conditions and the collaborator to work with. The sadness in the song is not the sadness of a performer recalling her past; it is the sadness of a skilled artist inhabiting a character and making the character’s sadness feel immediate and specific.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) demonstrated range that her public image had not fully suggested was there. Playing Irene Hoffman, a German woman called to testify about her relationship with an elderly Jewish man in the Nazi period, Garland was required to be vulnerable, to be historically specific, to inhabit a character from another culture and another time. The performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and it earned it because the performance was genuinely excellent — not because she was Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” in a new context.
The Judy Garland Show, which ran on CBS for one season in 1963 and 1964, gave her the opportunity to work in television with creative partners she trusted and with the kind of live-performance energy she had developed on the concert stage. The show was cancelled, partly because Bonanza was winning the ratings battle on NBC. But the cancellation came after twenty-six episodes that demonstrated her capacity to work at the highest professional level in a new medium.