Why Liza can never leave Cabaret

The Albert Hall is electric with excitement. When Liza Minnelli strides on stage - all endless legs, kooky smiles and slim figure starved to near perfection - the audience erupts in ecstatic applause. But nothing can compare with the ovation when she bursts into her signature song, Cabaret.

Liza has sung Cabaret - the torch song written by Kander and Ebb for the film's heroine, Sally Bowles, an American nightclub singer in prewar Berlin - thousands of times. But tonight, Liza's rendition is different. Instead of singing, "And when I go, I'm going like Elsie", about a good-time girl from Chelsea who dies of booze, she switches the lyrics, blazing, 'And when I go, I'm not going like Elsie'. The audience goes wild.

That was a few weeks ago. This week, to mark the 30th anniversary of Cabaret, the film is rereleased in Britain, showcasing Liza's iconic performance as Sally. Liza herself will never truly be free of the character - change the lyrics as she may. Like her mother Judy Garland, forever remembered as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and compelled to sing Over the Rainbow, Liza is doomed to be forever Sally Bowles.

It is still difficult to discern where Sally ends and Liza begins. Just 25 when she made the film, she retains the look of those glory days. Thirty years on, she still sports Sally's thick make-up, false eyelashes still frame her round eyes, and her public persona still mirrors Sally's: the eternal trouper, virulently ambitious, calling everyone "darling", having a taste for bisexual men; warm, generous, stagy, living to entertain... every inch a star.

Although the song Maybe This Time, which features in the film, was written specially for Liza, the part of Sally was not. Christopher Isherwood created Sally - an English girl of easy virtue - for a 1939 collection of short stories, Goodbye to Berlin. John Van Druten later resurrected her in the play I Am A Camera. And it was this work that Kander and Ebb transformed - with director Bob Fosse - into the Broadway musical Cabaret.

Liza was so determined to play Sally that she auditioned 14 times for producer Harold Prince - to no avail. Instead, Exodus actress Jill Hayward was cast for Broadway in 1966 and Judi Dench took her place in the 1968 London production. Liza, meanwhile, deftly included all the Cabaret songs in her nightclub act, making them her own. When the film came along, she coasted effortlessly into the part.

First, though, she consulted her father, legendary director Vincente Minnelli, on how to create the Sally Bowles look. He advised her to use Louise Brooks as her visual model. Then Liza selected her clothes at La Marche Aux Puces in Paris, and the image crystallised.

Shooting began in Berlin in summer

1971. Liza, separated from Peter Allen, her gay entertainer husband, was dallying with a young musician from Arkansas, Rex Kulbeth. However, she and Bob Fosse developed a deep bond which they would sustain till his death. They also snorted cocaine together. Eyewitnesses remember Liza living on crisps, Coca-Cola, tantrums and drugs. None the less, she turned in a bravura performance - with almost eerie echoes of her own life.

Sally is in denial about her unloving father, pretending he whisks her off on exotic holidays. Although Vincente Minnelli wore mascara and lipstick, and Judy caught him having sex with a man, Liza has never accepted his bisexuality. According to her sister, Lorna Luft: "She passionately resents the suggestion that her father had a secret gay life."

Then there's Sally's relationship with the bisexual character Brian Roberts. Liza's real-life grandfather, Frank Gumm, was gay, as was her mother's fourth husband, Mark Herron. While married to Judy, Mark had an affair with Peter Allen - later Liza's first husband.