10 Heart-Rending Details Surrounding The Tragic Last Days Of Judy Garland

6 /10 Booed In Melbourne

And the hits kept on coming as, in that same year, she was booed and driven off stage by an angry crowd at a Melbourne concert, during a tour around Australia.

Unable to appear on stage until an hour after the expected starting time (which had, in the past, also been the cause of her dismissal from the MGM studios), the audience believed that Garland was drunk when she eventually appeared on stage, which ignited their anger.

After 45 minutes of being booed and interrupted continuously with insults, she fled the scene.

5 /10 Can't Catch A Break

Eventually (and after having to sell his own house for a low price to make some quick money), some financial relief came for Judy in the form of a twenty-seven-show contract with the New York’s Palace Theatre.

Owning 75% of the revenue, the last show alone produced over $200,000 for the artist, but on that same night, a group of IRS agents was waiting for her backstage. They immediately took away most of the income as payment for her debts with the government agency.

4 /10 Accidental Death?

By 1969, Judy Garland was almost in her bare-bones, mentally and physically.

After suffering from serious self-image problems that lead her to be practically bulimic for her whole adult life, and, as her obituary said, having “suffered from hepatitis, exhaustion, kidney ailments, nervous breakdowns, near-fatal drug reactions, overweight, underweight and injuries suffered in falls,” her last husband Mickey Deans found her dead in the bathroom of the house that they were renting in Cardigan Lane, London. She had just turned forty-seven years old.

3 /10 Claims Of Suicide

The accusations of suicide were immediate, with many speculating that the actress and singer had finally managed to take her own life.

After the public learned that barbiturates had been involved as the physical cause of her death, there was not much doubt about suicide being the psychological motivation for their ingestion. But Judy Garland had a last surprise for her critics: that she died standing strong.

2 /10 The Coroner's Ruling

In fact, at the inquest, the coroner revealed that it was her long-time addiction to barbiturates (that she had once called her’ bolts and jolts’) that slowly poisoned her to death.

The autopsy showed that she hadn’t taken the anxiolytics and anticonvulsants all at once, but over the years, and this build-up of barbiturates eventually produced an overdose.

At her funeral, her Wizard of Oz co-star Ray Bolger summed her death in short words: “She just plain wore out.”

1 /10 The Last Farewell

Garland’s body was embalmed and brought to America, where she was interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in New York.

Before that, it is estimated that over twenty thousand people assisted her lying in repose at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan.

Resting in peace, her debts would nevertheless continue to press upon her heirs, most notably her daughter Liza Minnelli, who had to pay off her debts by working alongside her mother’s close friend, Frank Sinatra.

Only nine years after, in 1978, a sale of some of her belongings finally settled the matter of her inheritance and financial troubles and gave her, in death, the repose that she never could find alive.