Fatherhood Quote by Liza Minnelli

Even when she’s name-checking Bob Fosse, Liza Minnelli can’t resist pulling the camera back toward the more private auteur in her life: her father. The “of course” is doing sly work here. It’s a wink to the audience’s expectations - yes, Fosse is the mythic genius you’re supposed to be dazzled by - while quietly signaling that the real preparation, the foundational craft, happened elsewhere. The sentence is structured like a public credit followed by a corrective: respect the legend, but don’t mistake spectacle for authorship.

Minnelli’s subtext is inheritance, and not the sentimental kind. As Judy Garland’s daughter, she lived inside a culture that treated her lineage as both a coronation and a trap. By emphasizing work with her father, she reframes nepotism as apprenticeship. It’s not “I had access,” it’s “I did the homework.” That matters in a star system that often reduces women to charisma and luck, especially when they’re born famous.

There’s also a strategic humanizing move: Fosse represents the high-voltage, externally visible machinery of performance - precision, control, erotic geometry. “My father” shifts the register to something domestic, internal, almost old-fashioned: discipline learned in conversation, in rehearsal rooms that aren’t glamorous. She’s claiming artistic agency in a world eager to attribute her success to the men around her, by choosing which man actually shaped the work.