Actor captures Garland's final fragile months Christen O'Leary plays Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow. Near the end of her life, Judy Garland was tiny, frail, broke, dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol - but still working. "I am exhausted just playing her, I don't know how she lived it," said Christen O'Leary, star of End of the Rainbow. The Queensland Theatre Company production opens at the QPAC Playhouse on Thursday night, and so far previews have exulted O'Leary's performance as the legendary actor and singer. End of the Rainbow is set six months before Garland's early death, when she was encamped in London's Ritz Hotel while performing a series of gruelling cabaret shows at The Talk of the Town nightclub. With only her fifth fiancé (Anthony Standish as Mickey Deans) and her pianist Anthony (Hayden Spencer) around her, it's a warts and all look at a supreme but tortured talent. O'Leary has trimmed her already petite frame down to a tiny 46 kilograms to approach Garland's physique at the time. She also went through months of disciplined vocal training to punch out 11 of Garland's most memorable tunes, including Get Happy, The Trolley Song and Over the Rainbow. "I had throat surgery last year, and it was quite a long rehabilitation after that both physically and psychologically," O'Leary said. Because it's such a massive role, I was learning it months before I started rehearsal, just so I could come into rehearsal with it in me. O'Leary said nobody could ever sing exactly like Garland, so it was about showing the full depth of the star's vocal troubles at the time - and that legendary hypnotic spell she could cast over an audience. "You see her on the nights she was crap, you see her on the nights she was brilliant, because she was very hit and miss near the end," she said. O'Leary said most important to her was to show the vigour, energy and drive Garland possessed, despite the lack of control she often felt during her life - because the tragic aspects spoke for themselves. "There's nothing funny or glamorous or elegant about dying naked on a toilet at 47," she said. That's as tragic as it gets, and that breaks my heart, so I try to inject the love and the life and the spirit into her. End of the Rainbow plays at the QPAC Playhouse until March 22. Tickets are available online.