My Fair Lady (1964)
All she has to do is take off her glasses and let her hair down.
“ALL I WANT IS ‘ENRY ‘IGGINS’ ‘EAD!” Listening to Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) caterwaul in her over-the-top Cockney accent is what makes movies great. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) has suggested that Eliza’s accent is why she’s just a poor flower girl, and when she asks if he can change her diction, he takes up the challenge. He bets his friend Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess after six months of education. That education is painful, hence Eliza’s constant ululation.
But it’s when the imperious Higgins finally treats Eliza with kindness that she improves. Eliza demonstrates her refined speech in the song “The Rain in Spain,” after which she’s taken to the fancy racetrack Ascot to evaluate her progress. There she meets Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett), who takes a liking to her—but her cover is blown during a race, when she encourages her horse by yelling “move yer bloomin’ arse!!”
The final test is the Embassy Ball. Trouble awaits: a former phonetics student of Higgins’, Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), is in attendance. He claims no impostor can escape his detection, but Eliza comports herself so well that he proclaims her Hungarian royalty.
Now that Eliza can pass as a duchess, she worries about her future (she wails, “I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else”). She fights with Higgins and leaves his home, but the film ends with her coming back to him. Are we supposed to believe that they’re in love? Well, uh…1
Rating: 7/10, talks real genteel.
Cast and Crew
Julie Andrews originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in the 1956 stage version of “My Fair Lady,” but her role was usurped by Audrey Hepburn in the film.2 Hepburn was born in Belgium to a British father and a Dutch baroness mother. Her early dream was to dance, but malnutrition during WWII ended that dream (but likely gave her the distinctive, waifish look that supported her film career). We’ve only seen Hepburn in The Lavender Hill Mob, where she was onscreen for approximately five seconds, but she’s been a mainstay in our wrap-up columns due to her many Best Actress nominations. We’ve discussed her major movies in passing, but we’ll put ‘em here for good measure:
Roman Holiday (1953). Basically invented the Audrey Hepburn gamine type. A William Wyler film that, unlike Ben-Hur, is actually good.
Sabrina (1954). William Holden3 and Humphrey Bogart vie for the love of Hepburn’s title character.4
The Nun’s Story (1959). A performance I can’t stop thinking about. Go watch it.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). She’s Holly Golightly, wears the little black Givenchy dress.
The Children’s Hour (1961). The opposite of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: a dour, black-and-white adaptation of a Lillian Hellman play.
Charade (1963).
Did I give short shrift to Funny Face, War and Peace, Love in the Afternoon, and The Unforgiven? Yeah, probably—Hepburn’s one of those actors whose whole oeuvre ends up in the trivia canon. Post-My Fair Lady, Hepburn got a fifth and final Best Actress nod for Wait Until Dark (1967), then had one more hit with Robin and Marian (1976) alongside Sean Connery.
But, like the greatest actors, she’s more than the sum of her roles. She was known for her humanitarian work with UNICEF. She was a style icon. People joked that she couldn’t sing or act but her EGOT might make you reconsider that. And she was a movie star, a one of one; ChatGPT suggested Lily Collins as a modern equivalent to Hepburn, which is so wrong as to be offensive.
My Fair Lady was based on a 1956 Broadway musical with a book by Alan Jay Lerner & music by Frederick Loewe. Lerner and Loewe were a dynamic duo with hits for days. Three other productions of theirs to know:
“Brigadoon,” premiered 1947. About two American tourists who find the titular Scottish village that only appears for one day every hundred years. It had the songs “Almost Like Being In Love” and “The Heather On The Hill.”
The film Gigi (1958), which we’ve discussed before, and its 1973 adaptation to the stage.
“Camelot,” premiered 1960. Based on T. H. White’s novel “The Once and Future King,” about the Arthurian legend.5 King Arthur marries Guinevere and builds a peaceful kingdom with the Knights of the Round Table. Then Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot and ruins everything.
The pair also did the sometimes-maligned “Paint Your Wagon” and the musical film The Little Prince (1974).
The Trivia
My Fair Lady was based on a 1956 Broadway musical, which itself was based on the 1938 film Pygmalion6. That film was an adaptation of the same-named play by George Bernard Shaw7 (1856-1950), whose work we’ll be discussing today.8
Our goal will be to help you stop mixing up Irish9 playwright Shaw with three other Irish icons: Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The first confusing thing pertains to the Nobel Prize for Literature. Four Irishmen have won: Yeats was first in 1923, Shaw followed two years later, and Beckett took his home in 1969. (Wilde died before they started giving out Nobels; Seamus Heaney is the fourth Irish winner, but you probably don’t mix him up with those other guys.)
Shaw wrote over fifty plays, so the list below isn’t comprehensive. In KW/OU fashion, we’ll hit the major works and try to provide a useful level of detail on each one.
“Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (written 1893). Her profession: former prostitute, current madam.
“Arms and The Man” (1893-4). During the (apparently real) 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, a Bulgarian woman shelters and falls in love with an enemy soldier.10
“Caesar and Cleopatra”11 (1898). After discussing these two ad nauseam last week, you probably know the story.
“Man and Superman” (1901-2). Its name is from Nietzsche’s concept of the “Übermensch,” but the play appears to just be a comedy of manners—except for its third act, called “Don Juan in Hell.” That part is, uh, not part of your typical comedy of manners and is often performed separately.
“Major Barbara” (1905). Barbara Undershaft is an officer in the Salvation Army. Her father donates ill-gotten money to them; Barbara wants the organization to decline it but they don’t.
“Androcles and the Lion” (1912). Androcles, a Christian, removes a thorn from the paw of a lion. Later, because of his faith, Androcles is thrown to lions in the Roman arena; his lion friend is there and refuses to eat him.
“Heartbreak House”12 (1916-7). The title house belongs to elderly Capt. Shotover. It’s about how English culture led the country to destruction in WWI.
“Saint Joan” (1923). It’s about Joan of Arc. She gets set on fire.13
Now that you’ve seen all these titles, if someone now asks you about an Irish playwright who wrote, say, “Juno and the Paycock” (1924) you can cross Shaw off the list and guess someone else.
Some other noteworthy things about Shaw: he lived forever, he was a famed vegetarian, he hated English orthography, and he was in the Socialist Fabian Society. Another reason to mix him up with Wilde is he’s also one of those guys who said lots of pithy things. Here’s a list of some of his famous quotes.
Odds and Ends
Higgins tries out one of Demosthenes’ tricks on Eliza: making her speak with marbles in her mouth……Besides Higgins and Caesar, Rex Harrison is known for playing ghosts14, pope Julius II (in The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965), and the original Dr. Dolittle…Hepburn’s singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon…the movie opens with Eliza selling flowers in Covent Garden outside of a staging of Charles Gounod’s opera “Faust”…this is one of only four productions to win the Best Picture Oscar and either the Best Play or Best Musical Tony15…George Cukor, who we saw direct A Star Is Born and Wild Is the Wind, was behind the camera for My Fair Lady…the Shaw Festival, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, focuses on plays by him & his contemporaries.
It’s all but stated in the film: Higgins is gay. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, frustrated that stagings of his work kept implying that Eliza and Higgins end up together, later wrote an epilogue stating that Eliza marries Freddy, not Higgins.
Andrews and Hepburn aren’t the only two famous people to play Eliza, though: Shaw originally wrote the part for Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Mrs. is part of her stage name).
Holden and Hepburn reunited in 1964’s Paris When It Sizzles, which is not nearly as well-regarded.
Sabrina was remade in 1995 with Julia Ormond in the Hepburn role. To sorta quote Lloyd Bentsen: “Now, I’ve watched Audrey Hepburn. I’ve thought about Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn’s one of my favorite stars. Julia Ormond, you're no Audrey Hepburn.”
“The Once and Future King” was itself based on “Le Morte d’Arthur” by Thomas Malory.
If we go back and do the Best Actor films before 1950, this’ll be one of them, since Leslie Howard’s performance as Henry Higgins was nominated.
Shaw actually wrote the screenplay for the film and won an Oscar for the screenplay, making him one of two people who have won an Oscar and a Nobel (the other being Bob Dylan).
“Pygmalion” is based on the story of the same-named legendary Cypriot figure. The story is recounted in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: Pygmalion fell in love with his sculpture Galatea.
Though Shaw left Ireland when he was 20 and lived the rest of his very long life in England.
The title is from the opening of Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Arms and the man I sing.” It’s supposed to be ironic: the “Aeneid” glorifies war while Shaw’s work presents war as foolish.
It was published in Shaw’s “Three Plays for Puritans,” along with “The Devil’s Disciple” (written 1896) and “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” (1899).
Its subtitle is “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”; the “Russian Manner” part refers to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
And y’know, it wouldn’t hurt to have some more Shaw titles floating around in the back of your head: “Candida” (1894), “The Doctor's Dilemma” (1906), “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (1910), and “Back to Methuselah” (1918-20).
In Blithe Spirit (1945) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).
The other three are The Sound of Music (1965), A Man for All Seasons (1966), and Amadeus (1984). We’ll be watching the latter two.
Just to nitpick (since that seems to be my main role here lol), "My Fair Lady" and "The Sound of Music" won the Best Musical Tony, not the Best Play Tony.