WHEN your mum is Judy Garland, it's understandable that people want to draw comparisons between your showbiz credentials.

While Lorna Luft may have struggled to achieve the same height of fame as her mother, it hasn't been through lack of trying.

The Hollywood star and half-sister to Liza Minelli has a biog that reads something like War and Peace.

She's been on stage, in films and on TV, is a published novelist, a recording artist and an Emmy nominated producer. But it's her latest project that has brought her the most pain - and the most pleasure.

Songs My Mother Taught Me - A Celebration of the Music of Judy Garland, is a stage show that Lorna brings to the Cliffs Pavilion, Westcliff next week.

It received rave reviews and awards when it toured throughout the USA, but dragging up the past wasn't easy, says Lorna.

"People wanted me to do this for a long time," she explains. "But I ran away. I didn't want to face it. But I got into my forties and thought, I've got to look at my history. Then I started to accept it a lot more. I truly believe that you don't get to know your parents until you're in your forties."

Hinting that her relationship with her mother wasn't always plain sailing, Lorna adds: "I think that the most amazing gift you can ever have, is that you can forgive. That's when you understand your heritage. Once you embrace it, you can move on. Now, putting on this show is a celebration for me of where I came from."

Lorna, 55, is the product of Judy's marriage to Sidney Luft, her third husband and manager.

She lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, musician Colin Freeman, and her two children from her first marriage to musician and artist manager Jake Hooker. Her children, Vanessa and Jesse Richards, are the only grandchildren of Judy Garland.

As a child, Lorna's life was surreal. Her famous mother died in 1969, when Lorna was just 17.

"I didn't know any different," she says of her Hollywood childhood. "I thought Frank Sinatra went to everyone's house. The good times were great and the bad times were devastating, but one thing it wasn't, was boring."

Lorna first stepped into showbusiness on her mother's television series, the Judy Garland Show in 1963. She soon joined the family act on a summer concert tour, the highlight being Garland's third and final appearance at New York's famed Palace Theater on Broadway in 1967.

"You know, you come from a family of lawyers and you become a lawyer. You come from a family of doctors, you become a doctor," she says, by way of explaining how she ended up i the limelight.

"All I did was follow in the family business. I didn't know how to do anything else."

But coming from such talented parentage made it hard to be taken seriously at first she says.

"It was hard for me to be a performer in my own right at first," she explains. "That's why I shied away from it. That's why I sang on Blondie albums and dyed my hair purple."

By 19, Lorna was stopping the show on her own, starring in the Broadway musical Promises, Promises. She continued on the New York stage in Snoopy and then took a dramatic turn alongside Farrah Fawcett in Extremities.

In 1998 she wrote an autobiography and among its revelations is that she had a romance with Barry Manilow.

In films, she is most remembered as Pink Lady Paulette Rebchuck in the camp classic Grease 2, but it's the stage where she most feels at home.

"I still get such a buzz out of it," she says. "My stage manager says good God, do you still get nervous? But I think the day you stop getting nervous, you may as well quit."

Songs My Mother Taught Me is a multi-media production which melds one of the world's most familiar songbooks with personal memories of a loving daughter.

"It's two hours of great music," explains Lorna. "It's a mother, daughter story, but with a lot of great humour."

Rather than hide from her mother's name and fame, Lorna has embraced her notoriety and found a way to keep her memory alive.