Lorna Luft: My mother is still with me every day of my life

She will be forever remembered as the pig-tailed, wide-eyed little girl in ruby slippers looking for that elusive place over the rainbow.

Judy Garland, the child star who clicked her heels and went on to become a legend with such films as The Wizard Of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis and A Star is Born,burned brightly but burnt out all too soon.

At the age of 47, after a lifetime of drug-taking, she was found dead at the Chelsea house she was renting in London from an overdose of Seconal sleeping tablets. She had just remarried for the fifth time and her new husband Mickey Deans discovered her body.

Now, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of her death, her daughter Lorna Luft says her mother watches over her.

“She is there every waking moment of my life,” says Lorna from her home in Palm Springs, California. “It’s always something. Things happen to me every single day. I will be in a tiny café and suddenly a version of Over The Rainbow will start to play.

“Now my husband just looks at me and says, ‘Here we go again’. It is random and I have got used to it. In fact it is really comforting. I want to see it as my mother looking out for me.

"Instead of running away from her films and her music and it being painful, now it is a good feeling. Now it is like I have a guardian angel. Now it is comforting.”

Luft, a successful singer in her own right and whose 1998 memoir Me And My Shadows catalogued among other things her life with her extraordinary mother, has had 40 years to come to terms with her grief but even now she concedes she takes one day at a time.

“It was the most devastating day, the saddest day of my life when my mother died,” she says.

“I was 16 years old and it was so public. WhenPrincess Diana died I knew how the Princes felt. I thought: ‘I have been there’. Everyone is watching you. I have come to terms with her death but it never gets any better, it just gets different. As you get older you come to terms with all of the good and the not so good.

“I don’t escape my mother. Most people are able to grieve in private but she is constantly on the radio or television or in a newspaper or magazine. It doesn’t get any better.”

In her memoir, which she says helped her work through her grief, Lorna recalled one episode when her mother nearly killed her brother Joey with a butcher’s knife.

By then she had become the parent to her increasingly fragile mother whose dependency on barbiturates and amphetamines had plagued her career. As a child Garland’s mother would give her daughter pep pills to keep her energy levels up.

Then in 1938 MGM studio doctors prescribed Garland amphetamines and barbiturates to help her keep her weight down and once again help her keep pace with her gruelling filming schedules.

Lorna insists everyone was taking such pills at the time, and there was an ignorance about how dangerous they were. “They were seen as magic, there was an innocence about it all back in the Thirties.”

It was little wonder then that soon Garland could function neither with or without pills. There would be suicide attempts and Lorna would become her mother’s protector before eventually fleeing with her brother to live with her father, Judy’s third husband Sidney Luft.

“I had that role of carer for my mother in my teenage years when I would watch over her throughout the night, get no sleep and then get me and my brother ready for school,” she recalls. “So, yes, there wasn’t much of a chance for me to talk about how I was feeling.”

Like her mother, Lorna has battled her own drug demons, which, even after an intervention from Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, who locked her up in his house for two weeks, she could not initially conquer.

Indeed her life was spiralling out of control. She married and divorced rock guitarist Jake Hooker from the group The Arrows and was heavily into the New York party scene and cocaine-taking of the Seventies. After her first line of cocaine she introduced her half-sister Liza Minnelli to the drug.

Luckily for Lorna she was able, as she puts it, “to break the cycle” and is proud to admit that after years of therapy she has been sober for 26 years. She is now on speaking terms with Liza after some very public rows and made peace with her father before he died in 2005.

And any anger Lorna may have had towards her mother has now faded.

“I am 56 now and i have gone through a lot of therapy and a lot of living and life,” she says.

“The difference for me is that I had help. I was able to go through AA and get sober. I am incredibly grateful to have grown up in the time I have where there is help. My mum didn’t have the help. There wasn’t anything for her.”

Lorna’s childhood stands in stark contrast to that of her own family. She is married to British composer Colin Freeman, 42, and they have two children Jesse, 25 and Vanessa, 19.

They discuss “everything” and nothing is left to fester. Having children, she says, helped her enormously. “When I had my kids my mother became my guardian angel,” she says warmly.

“When you have your own children you have to explain to them your heritage. You have to come to terms with it so you can explain where they come from. I would have loved my mother to have known my children but then it is up to me to tell them about her.”

Both Jesse and Vanessa have decided on very different career paths, as a broker and a chef respectively, although Lorna would have encouraged them in whatever they wanted to do even if it had been a life in showbusiness. She admits, however, that the idea of child stars makes her feel uncomfortable.

“I have real trouble with children being put on the television and in movies,” she says, referencing her mother’s start in showbusiness at two-and-a-half (as “Baby” Gumm). “It is so important that the child has had a good grounding but there is something about a five-year-old having an agent that makes me nuts.”

While Lorna readily admits she does not have the hunger for stardom her mother had, she is proud to put her family before her career.

“I am very lucky i have a fantastic husband,” beams the singer, who regularly pays tribute to her mother in her shows. “I finally got it right and married a Brit. My children are healthy and doing well. I have a life and it is not about showbusiness. For me it is family first. Before I had my children i hated Mother’s Day – I would stay in bed with the covers over my head. Now it is my favourite, favourite day out of all of them.

“My family are the frontrunners. I wake up every morning grateful. I do not take anything for granted. When people ask if I’d like a bigger career I say no because I am lucky I have a life. I love what I do but it is my job, it is not my life.”

Tomorrow Lorna will have a moment of reflection but she admits she prefers to celebrate her mother’s birthday on June 10 and is keen to celebrate her mother’s work, hinting that in the future she would like to exhibit all of the memorabilia relating to her mother’s career.

“I don’t do anything on the 22nd as it is painful and it always will be,” says Lorna, who is hoping to publish a self-help book in the future.

“She was an original. There was no singer like her, no performer like her. She came along and broke the mould. She was not the norm. No one had this great big voice. When she performed it was such an event and there were all these incredible movies written for her.

“She was always the girl next door, the wide-eyed best friend. People identified with her far more than the bombshells of the day.

"I had an incredibly talented, funny, loving, warm, troubled parent that was my mother. She was the best mother she knew how to be and I loved her, i will always love her and am so grateful for everything she taught me.”

Friday Night Is Music Night: Lorna Luft And Friends Celebrate The Music Of Judy Garland is on BBC Radio 2 on July 31 at 7.30pm.