William Shatner, who starred alongside Judy Garland in the 1961 drama Judgment at Nuremberg, said she was “very fragile” during filming.
Shatner, who played the young Captain Harrison Byers alongside Chief Judge Dan Haywood, played by Spencer Tracy, recalled the behind-the-scenes experience in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
He began by saying he was a big fan of Garland. “As a teenager from Montreal, I used to go with my parents to New York to see plays. And I saw her on stage at Times Square performing a show — but she was drunk,” Shatner recalled.
At the time, Shatner did not know Garland had a long history of substance abuse, which made her drunken state shocking. “I looked at her and thought, ‘My God, she is my heroine. And I think she’s drunk,'” he remembered.
“I was a teenager. I thought, ‘Well, she can’t be drunk on stage!’ And, well, she was, and it made no sense. And I was very disappointed,” Shatner explained, who only later learned about Garland’s struggles.
For that reason, the actor fondly remembered the brief time he worked with her. “She was an enormous talent. And when she came in to shoot her scene, I hadn’t seen her since that experience so many years ago. There she was, performing her fragile part. And that was part of a continuity I value very much.”
In the film, Garland played Irene Hoffmann, a German woman summoned to the Nuremberg trials as a witness to testify about her alleged romantic involvement with a Jewish businessman.
Garland’s character became emotional and broke into tears as she recalled the trial of her former acquaintance, who was accused of violating racial purity laws.
Garland’s performance in the film earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, although the award went to Rita Moreno for West Side Story.
“It was a wonderful and surprising experience for a young actor. I was a newcomer to the film world at the time, and there I was, in the middle of all these giants who came for a day or two, were filmed, and left. It was a journey. It was beautiful,” Shatner said about the film.
Photo: Creative Commons / Public Domain. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
