B Y LEE ROBERTS, Wilmington Star-News, April 1998

When Liza Minnelli takes the stage Sunday and Monday nights in uptown Charlotte’s Blumenthal Center, she’ll be treated like an entertainment superstar, which she is. In fact, Minnelli, 52, has succeeded so wildly in so many different ways throughout her career, it is easier to characterize her by what she is not.

She is not her mother. Despite the many comparisons to her mom, film actress and singer Judy Garland, Minnelli remains her own person. She has been compared to her mother because their talents - and their weaknesses - are so similar.

Garland married five different men; Minnelli has been married and divorced three times. Garland died of a drug overdose at age 47 in 1969; Minnelli has battled her own demons with drugs and alcohol and had a well-publicized stay at the Betty Ford clinic.

"Her mother just comes leaping out at you at times," said Blake Edwards, who directed Minnelli in 'Victor/Victoria" on Broadway last year, in New York magazine. "And of course she is very aware of it. Her mother is very alive in her. Sometimes it's scary."

She has not mothered Elvis' love child. Despite what you may have read at the supermarket checkout counters, which have ravaged her mercilessly throughout the years.

"Don’t worry," she said in a Prodigy on-line interview last year. 'As far as being at death's door one minute and getting married and adopting a child the next -I am doing neither. I'm happy, I'm well. To tell you the truth, I don’t read the tabloids. And the only time it worries me is if it worries somebody else. By the way, never believe anything you read in the tabloids.”

Minnelli has been perfect fodder for the tabloids because of her Hollywood bloodlines, her great successes and the personal tragedies that have befallen her, such as her mother's early death, her divorces and battles with drugs, and her three miscarriages.

She is not Sally Bowles. But her performance as the sexy cabaret singer in Nazi Germany in the 1972 film Cabaret was so brilliant, so defining, that it's as if she is frozen forever in that image of 26 years - half her life - ago.

"People don’t really know me," she said. "They only really know, like, Sally Bowles.” Bowles, unfortunately, has been one of the few high points of a film career most thought would have been more accomplished by now. She was nominated for an Academy Award as Pookie Adams in 1969's "The Sterile Cuckoo" and won the Oscar and a Golden Globe as Bowles, but aside from roles in 1977's "New York, New York” and 1981's "Arthur," she has done little since to distinguish herself on the silver screen.

"I'm picky about movies because I was lucky enough to play such good roles," she said. "I won’t do one unless I really dig it."

She is not limited to film. She has won three Tony Awards: for Flora, the Red Menace" in 1965, for "Liza at the Winter Garden” in 1973 and for "The Act" in 1977-78. She won an Emmy for the 1972 TV special "Liza With a Z."

And though all of those awards were handed out at least 20 years ago, Minnelli hasn’t stopped performing - and excelling - in the years since. Her three-week concert engagement at Camegie Hall in May 1987 made her the first and only entertainer in the hall's 100-year history to completely sell out three weeks of appearances.

In 1991, Minnelli broke a 60-year-old box-office record at Radio City Music Hall with her musical extravaganza, "Stepping Out at Radio City."

She is not a pop star. Despite the energetic singing and dancing abilities that have made her a darling of Broadway, despite the strong, pure singing voice, Minnelli has never found success as a recording artist. Her only gold record was in England, the 1989 single "Losing My Mind," produced by the Pet Shop Boys. She has never had a single in the Billboard magazine Top 40 charts.Yet she continues to sing to packed houses throughout the world. She knows how to put on a show. And Sunday and Monday at the Blumenthal, she'll do it.

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