My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady, American musical film, released in 1964, that was adapted from the long-running Broadway musical of the same name and proved to be a great popular and critical success. The movie, which starred Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, won eight Academy Awards, including that for best picture.

The film, set in London in 1912, opens outside the Covent Garden opera house, where noted phonetics expert Henry Higgins (played by Harrison) is taking notes on the accents of those around him, especially the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Hepburn). He tells language expert Col. Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that, given enough time, he could teach Eliza to speak English well enough for her to be taken for a duchess. The following morning Eliza arrives at Higgins’s home, seeking elocution lessons in order to gain employment at a flower shop. Pickering declares that he will pay for such lessons if Higgins can make good on his claim. Higgins agrees to help Eliza, who moves into his home. A few days later Eliza’s father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), a dustman, arrives, asking after his daughter and seeking money. He accepts £5. Impressed by his approach to ethics, Higgins recommends him to a wealthy American who is studying morality.

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Higgins subjects Eliza to many forms of speech training, none of which is successful. Just as Higgins and Pickering are about to give up, Higgins gives Eliza an encouraging speech, extolling the glories of the English language, and she experiences a breakthrough. As a test, Higgins takes her to the Ascot racecourse. Here she meets a number of people, including Higgins’s mother, Mrs. Higgins (Gladys Cooper), and a young man, Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett). All are charmed by her impeccable accent and not fully reformed grammar, but she relapses into Cockney when urging on a racehorse. After further training, Eliza is put to the final test. She attends an embassy ball, where Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), a Hungarian phonetics expert, declares that she is Hungarian and of noble birth. After Eliza’s success at the event, Higgins and Pickering are elated with their achievement, and they congratulate each other with great enthusiasm. However, both ignore Eliza’s contribution to her transformation. Higgins’s indifference enrages Eliza, and she leaves.

Accompanied by Freddy, who is smitten by her, Eliza returns to her home, only to find that her former neighbours no longer accept her. She discovers that her father has inherited a substantial sum of money from the wealthy American, and, though he is less than thrilled about having to be respectable, he is about to marry his longtime girlfriend. Eventually, Eliza takes refuge with Mrs. Higgins. The next day Higgins searches for her and finds her with his mother. Eliza refuses to return with him, however, saying that she plans to marry Freddy and work for Karpathy. Higgins returns to his study to lament her absence. As he is consoling himself, listening to tapes of her speaking lessons, she returns.

The play My Fair Lady, adapted by Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music) from the 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, opened on Broadway in 1956 and won six Tony Awards, including best musical. The production, starring Harrison as Higgins, Julie Andrews as Eliza, and Holloway as her father, ran for 2,717 performances, until September 1962. Film producer Jack L. Warner felt that Andrews was relatively unfamiliar to movie audiences and chose to cast Hepburn for her star power. Hepburn’s singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. (Walt Disney, however, was not bothered by Andrews’s lack of name recognition and cast her in Mary Poppins [1964], which was a huge success and earned Andrews an Academy Award.) Harrison was perhaps the first actor to use a wireless microphone in the production of a musical film. My Fair Lady features a number of memorable songs, including “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” The movie, directed by George Cukor and with production design, scenic design, and costumes by Cecil Beaton, was restored in 1994 by James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris.

Production notes and credits

• Studio: Warner Brothers
• Director: George Cukor
• Writer: Alan Jay Lerner (screenplay)
• Music: André Previn (uncredited)
• Cinematography: Harry Stradling, Sr.

Cast

• Rex Harrison (Henry Higgins)
• Audrey Hepburn (Eliza Doolittle)
• Wilfrid Hyde-White (Col. Hugh Pickering)
• Stanley Holloway (Alfred P. Doolittle)
• Gladys Cooper (Mrs. Higgins)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Lead actor* (Rex Harrison)
• Supporting actor (Stanley Holloway)
• Supporting actress (Gladys Cooper)
• Art direction*
• Cinematography (color)*
• Costume design (color)*
• Direction*
• Editing
• Music*
• Sound*
• Writing