Julie Budd is one of those enduring talents who has outlived her almost premature early success. Discovered at age 12 in the late 1960s, she played her first engagement in the Catskills that same year, and was appearing on the Merv Griffin Show six months later; she subsequently became a fixture on the talk show and supper club circuits. From her precocious beginnings, co-starring with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Liberace, George Burns, and Bob Hope, Budd developed into a sophisticated interpreter of popular songs, comparable to Sinatra or Torme, playing all of the best venues from Las Vegas to the Catskills. Budd has also done some acting, principally in association with the Circle Repertory Theater and Playwright's Horizons in New York, as well as occasional film appearances, but her main activity in recent years has been her one-woman show, which also yielded her album Pure Imagination, issued in 1997. If You Could See Me Now followed in the spring of 2000. ~ Bruce Eder