Liza’s ’72 spectacular restored for Showtime

“You like my legs?” Minnelli chortles, her laughter a clue that the cigarette she’s holding isn’t the day’s first. “But you never see what you don’t want to,” she says, referring to the teasing camera angles. Somehow, at just the right moment, it cuts away.

“That was just like Fosse,” she goes on, full of praise for the jazz-dance genius. “He was a tease. And he was a flirt. I would watch his face to learn his choreography. His face told me more than his body movement. The body movement just lets you imitate what somebody does. The face tells you why.”

With their film “Cabaret” and their TV special, 1972 was a flashpoint in both their careers.

Since then, Minnelli has had her seismic ups and downs while logging four marriages, four divorces and lots of tabloid headlines. Meanwhile, she has had more than her share of physical ailments.

“I’ve got two false hips, a wired-up knee, scoliosis, which I’ve always had, and three crushed disks,” she announces defiantly. “But I feel great. I dance every day — a 2 1/2-hour class every morning.”

As a dancer (like anything informed by accumulating years) you discover how to do it more efficiently, she notes; how to be more compact with your movements.

“You learn to get older, you learn to use” — whereupon she interrupts herself to burst into song: “You gotta use what you got, to get what you want, before what you got is gone!” And roars with laughter.

“It’s one’s own responsibility to stay well as far as optimism goes,” she says, “and to learn from experience: ‘Holy Christ! I never want to get to HERE again!’ And then you figure out how not to. Besides, my mother taught me: If something that happened to you really bothers you, rewrite it. It’s your memory, rewrite it! You’re allowed!”

Her recurring role on the Fox comedy “Arrested Development” — as a randy socialite with a vertiginous tendency to take thudding pratfalls — demonstrated Liza may take her art seriously, but not so much herself.

And despite her colorful and often glorious past, she insists she’s plenty satisfied to live in the present — and the future.

She says she seldom screens her films.

“I don’t think I’ve looked at ‘Cabaret’ in years — and never alone. I would never sit alone and look at my own stuff.” She chuckles. “I don’t know, maybe I was frightened by ’Sunset Boulevard’ as a child.”

Never fear. Liza is no Norma Desmond.

“I just can’t groove on myself. I can’t do it. I groove on other people. So when I see ‘Liza with a ‘Z”’ — which indeed she has watched, with relish — “I see Fosse. And I see the dancers. And I see Fred (who died in 2004), in every word I speak.”

After all, the show captures forever a long-ago evening, along with the spirit of geniuses passed on. But celebrating it now, Liza Minnelli is very much alive.

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