The greatest films The &Greatest& and the &Best& in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org
My Fair Lady
Background
My Fair Lady (1964) was experienced director
George Cukor's film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1912 play
Pygmalion that had played successfully on Broadway from March 15,
to 1962. Shaw's plot was derived from Latin poet Ovid's story (in the Metamorphoses)
about a character named Pygmalion who fell in love with a beautiful ivory
statue of a woman. In later Greek tradition, his prayers to Venus that the
beloved statue - Galatea - would come to life came true so that they could
The non-musical version of the play, from Shaw's own
screenplay, was first filmed in Britain in 1938 by co-directors Anthony Asquith
and Leslie Howard (who also co-starred with Dame Wendy Hiller). The tale is
about a 'guttersnipe' Cockney flower girl heroine (Hepburn), who is trained
by a misogynistic, bachelor linguistics expert (Higgins) to speak properly
within six months - the result of a daring challenge and bet. During her elocution
lessons, her unrepentant, calculating drunk father (Holloway) appears for
handouts, and she makes an embarrassing first appearance at the opening day
Ascot Races, but she catches the eye of high-born but poor Freddy Eynsford-Hill.
Although she experiences personal triumph within high society at the Embassy
Ball, and wins her teacher's love, she storms off after being transformed
- only to return by film's end.
Warner Bros.' musical romantic comedy was expensive-to-produce (at $17
million) - their most expensive film to date, partially due to the fact that
the studio had to pay $5.5 million for film rights to the popular Broadway
hit. It turned out to be one of the top five most successful films in 1964
- a combination of clever lyrics and singable tunes, with a great lead and
supporting cast, and lavishly-designed theatrical sets and costumes. Alan
Jay Lerner, who was responsible for the screenplay, co-wrote the music and
lyrics with Frederick (Fritz) Loewe. Producer Jack Warner's will prevailed
and the Cockney flower vendor character played by little-known Julie Andrews
on Broadway was replaced by well-known, non-singing 'Cinderella' actress
Audrey Hepburn (whose voice was dubbed by Marnie Nixon although Hepburn sang
her own tracks) - to guarantee greater box-office business.
Ironically, Julie Andrews was awarded a Best Actress Academy Award for her
role in Disney's competing film Mary Poppins, and Hepburn failed
to receive a nomination for her part. [During her acceptance speech, Andrews
thanked Jack Warner &for making this possible.&] Rex Harrison reprised
his legendary stage performance on celluloid as the linguistics professor
with a unique 'non-singing' vocal style. Lerner and Loewe's score for the
musical includes some of the best known songs and lyrics ever: &The
in Spain,& &I Could Have Danced All Night,& &On
the Street
Where You Live,& &I'm Getting Married in the Morning,& &With
a Little Bit of Luck,& and &I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.&
George Cukor, a veteran 'women's director,' made a sumptuous, glamorous,
brilliant Technicolor film with well-loved tunes - it was honored with twelve
Academy Award nominations and eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Actor
(Rex Harrison), Best Director (Cukor's only Best Director award in
his career), Best Color Cinematography (in widescreen 70 mm), Best Color
Direction/Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Score (Andre Previn), and
Color Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). The four losing categories were
Supporting Actor and Actress (Stanley Holloway and Gladys Cooper),
Best Screenplay
Based on Material from Another Medium, and Best Film Editing.
In the decade
of the 60s, My Fair Lady joined two other highly praised,
big box-office
films when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture (as
The title credits and musical overture from the film are
accompanied by colorful, dazzling close-ups of spring flowers - which happen
to line the stairway of the Covent Garden Opera house. Elegantly-dressed,
high-society opera-goers are leaving after a performance and heading for
horse-drawn cabs and motorized vehicles. They begin bustling about to find
shelter when rain begins to fall. Street vendors cover their wares in the
marketplace. Young Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett) collides with Eliza
Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a disheveled Cockney flower vendor, while looking
for a cab for his mother Mrs. Eynsford-Hill (Isobel Elsom). Eliza accuses
both of them of ruining her &full day's wages& of scattered violets that are now trod
mud: &Well, if you'd done your duty by him as a mother should, you
wouldn't let him spoil a poor girl's flowers and then run away without payin'.&
When Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) gives Eliza some
coins, but isn't given flowers in return, Eliza is cautioned by a bystander
that a suspicious character behind a pillar, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex
Harrison), is &takin'
down ev'ry blessed word you're sayin'.& She immediately assumes that she
in trouble for selling flowers illegally - she defends herself as a &respectable
girl,& arguing to bystanders that she did nothing wrong: &Well, I'm makin'
an honest livin'.& Higgins appears and calms her down by showing her his
with strange shorthand symbols, and he reads back to her from
his notes what
she said with the exact same exaggerated pronounciation: &I
say, capt'n; n'
baw ya flahr orf a pore gel.&
Eliza is even more startled when Higgins identifies her birthplace
in &Lisson
Grove& - she bursts into tears:
I'm a good girl, I am!
After thoughtfully predicting that Pickering is from &Cheltenham, Harrow,
Cambridge, and er - India,& Higgins explains his perennial search for British
dialects and his talent for knowing speech patterns and their corresponding
locations - he is a phonetics expert: &Simple phonetics. The science of
That's my profession, also my hobby. Anyone can spot an Irishman
or a Yorkshireman
by his brogue, but I can place a man within six miles.
I can place him within
two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.& And
he brutally criticizes
Eliza's ugly &detestable boo-hooing& and crude
pronunciations:
A woman who utters such disgusting and depressing noise has no
right to be anywhere, no right to live. Remember that you are a human being
with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language
is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible. Don't sit there crooning
like a bilious pigeon.
While she indignantly belly-aches at his insults with loud,
grating utterances such as &Ah-ah-aw-aw-oo-oo!&, he delivers a well-aimed tirade at the deterioration
of the English language. To the snobby, intolerant Higgins, ignorance,
inarticulateness,
dialects and unrefined language produce a &verbal class
distinction,& much
the same way as money ensures advantages and a higher class of living, in
&Why Can't the English Learn to Speak&:
Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters
Condemned by every syllable she utters
By right she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue...
This is what the British population
Calls an elementary education...
It's 'ow' and 'garn' that keep her in her place,
Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now, should be antique.
[To Pickering] If you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you do,
Why you might be selling flowers too...
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taught their Greek
In France every Frenchman knows his language from 'A' to 'Zed' -
The French don't care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce
it properly.
Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
The Hebrews learn it backwards which is absolutely frightening.
Use proper English, you're regarded as a freak.
Oh, why can't the English -
Why can't the English learn to speak?
So the Professor makes an initial challenge toward Pickering which becomes
the cornerstone of the film's plot. He wagers with the Colonel that within
six months, he can teach Eliza Doolittle to speak articulately so that she
will be transformed into a pure-speaking lady, so that no one will suspect
her Cockney origins when she is passed off as a duchess at an Embassy Ball.
She will become a proper, aristocratic lady just by being taught proper
You see this creature with her curbstone English. The English that
will keep her in the gutter till the end of her days. Well, sir, in six
I could pass her off as a duchess at an Embassy Ball. I could
even get her
a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, which requires
better English...[To
Eliza] Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf. You disgrace
to the noble architecture
of these columns! You incarnate insult to
the English language! I could pass
you off as, ah, the Queen of Sheba.
The Colonel (&the author of Spoken Sanscrit&), as it turns out,
journeyed from India to meet &Henry Higgins, author of Higgins' Universal
Alphabet.& Now acquainted with each other after their chance meeting,
Higgins invites Pickering to his home at 27A Wimpole Street and they wander
off speaking about the 147 &distinct languages& or Indian dialects. Among
the other street vendors, Eliza has had her interest piqued in becoming
lady. With her untutored manner, she sings and dances with them about
dreams in &Wouldn't It Be Loverly?&:
All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air.
Wit Oh wouldn't it be loverly?
Lots of choc' Lots of coal makin' lots of heat.
Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet, Oh wouldn't it be loverly?
Oh, so loverly sittin' abso-bloomin'-lutely still!
I would never budge 'til Spring crept over my window sill.
Someone's head restin' Warm and tender as he can be,
Who t Oh wouldn't it be loverly?
Loverly, loverly, loverly, loverly.
Early the next morning, Eliza's hard-drinking, disreputable, scruffy-looking
father Alfred (Stanley Holloway) is looking for his daughter in the Covent
Garden market area - boasting to his friends Jamie (John Alderson) and Harry
(John McLiam) that he deserves a paternal handout:
I give her everythin'; I give her the greatest gift that a human
being can give to another: life. I introduced her to this 'ere planet
with all its wonders and marvels. The sun that shines, the moon
that glows,
Hyde Park to walk through on a fine spring night. The whole
ruddy city o'
London to roam around in, sellin 'er bloomin' flowers.
I give 'er all that,
then I disappears and leaves 'er on 'er own to
enjoy it. Now, if that ain't
worth half-a-crown now and again, I'll
take my belt off and give 'er what
Although at first, Eliza resists giving her father any of
her hard-earned money: &Y'ain't gonna take me hard-earned wages and pass 'em on to a bloody
pub-keeper,& she relents. Because of her &bit o' luck& the previous night
when Higgins generously threw coins into her flower basket, she gives
father a half-crown. After Eliza hears the church bells peal, she
is reminded
of Higgins' appraisal that she is condemned by every syllable
she speaks,
and his equally promising words about how he could transform
her speech differences
under his tutelage.
In Higgins' study at his residence on Wimpole Street, the
professor and his houseguest are studying vowel sounds produced from a
vibrating tuning fork taken from a rack full of tuning forks. They also
listen to a phonograph playing recorded phonetic sounds when Eliza appears
at the Higgins front door. The maid Mrs. Pearce (Mona Washbourne) admits
her into the study, thinking she is one of Higgins' subjects of &business& study: &Well, she's
common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away
only I thought
perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machine.& But when
Eliza makes her
entrance, Higgins brusquely dismisses her: &Oh, no, no,
no. This is the girl
I jotted down last night. She's no use. I've got all
the records I want of
the Lisson Grove lingo. I'm not gonna waste another
cylinder on that. Now
be off with you, I don't want you.&
Eliza begs to be taught to speak well enough to work at a flower shop.
announces that she has decided to hire Higgins to give her elocution
but Higgins is very uninterested:
Higgins: Pickering? Shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall
we just throw her out of the window?
Eliza: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo! I won't be called a baggage, not when I've offered
to pay like any lady.
Pickering: What do you want, my girl?
Eliza: I want to be a lady in a flower shop 'stead of sellin' at the corner
o' Tottenham Court Road. But they won't take me unless I can talk more
(gesturing toward Higgins) He said he could teach me. Well, here
I am ready
to pay. I'm not asking any favor - and he treats me as if I
was dirt. (Turning
toward Higgins) I know what lessons cost as well as
you do, and I'm ready
Pickering convinces Higgins that it would make an interesting challenge
to actually teach Eliza how to speak - to change her from a drab 'guttersnipe'
into a beautiful woman through language education:
Pickering: What about your boast that you could pass her off as
a duchess at the Embassy Ball, eh? I'll say you're the greatest teacher alive
if you make that good. I'll bet you all the expenses of the experiment that
you can't do it. I'll even pay for the lessons.
Eliza: Oh, you're real good. Thank you, capt'n.
Higgins: You know, it's almost irresistible. She's so deliciously low. So
horribly dirty.
Eliza: (protesting) I ain't dirty. I washed my face and hands before I come,
Higgins: I'll take it. I'll make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe.
Eliza: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!
Higgins: We'll start today, now, this moment! Take her away, Mrs. Pearce,
and clean her. Sandpaper, if it won't come off any other way. Is there a good
fire in the kitchen?
Mrs. Pearce: Yes, but -
Higgins: Take all her clothes off and burn them and ring up and order some
new ones. Just wrap her in brown paper till they come.
Eliza: You're no gentleman, you're not, to talk of such things. I'm a good
girl, I am. And I know what the likes of you are, I do.
Higgins: We want none of your slum prudery here, young woman. You've got to
learn to behave like a duchess. Now take her away, Mrs. Pearce, and if she
gives you any trouble, wallop her.
And Higgins optimistically predicts that she will become
an attractive lady to the men in town: &By george, Eliza, the streets will be strewn with
bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before I've done with
When she resists his cold insults and stomps out, he tempts her back with
chocolates: &Think of it, Eliza. Think of chocolates, and taxis, and gold,
and diamonds!& And then to answer Pickering's questions about the six month
&experiment in teaching& while she is in his hands, Higgins describes what
will happen - tongue in cheek:
Eliza, you are to stay here for the next six months learning how
to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist shop. If you're good
whatever you're told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom, have
lots to eat,
and money to buy chocolates and take rides in taxis. But if you
naughty and idle, you shall sleep in the back kitchen amongst the
black beetles,
and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At
the end of six months,
you shall be taken to Buckingham Palace in a
carriage, beautifully dressed.
If the King finds out that you're not
a lady, the police will take you to
the Tower of London, where your
head will be cut off as a warning to other
presumptuous flower girls.
But if you are not found out, you shall have a
present of, uh, seven-and-six
to start life with a lady in a shop. If you
refuse this offer, you
will be the most ungrateful, wicked girl, and the angels
for you. Now, are you satisfied, Pickering?
As Eliza is dragged upstairs to the bathroom to her uncertain
fate by Mrs. Pearce, screaming: &If I'd known what I would've let myself in for I wouldn't
have come here. I've always been a good girl, I have, and I won't be put
Higgins reiterates his confidence in the wager: &In six months, in three
she has a good ear and a quick tongue, I'll take her anywhere and I'll
her off as anything. I'll make a queen of that barbarous wretch.&
The unwashed Cockney girl is led into a fancy new bedroom,
while a maid runs water into a bathtub in the adjoining bathroom. Mrs.
Pearce admonishes:
&You know, you can't be a nice girl inside if you're dirty outside.& Eliza
is overwhelmed and in awe of the fancy room: &It's too good for the likes
of me. I shall be afraid to touch anything. I ain't a duchess yet, you
Two serving girls and Higgin's housekeeper enter the bathroom, shut the door
behind them, and wrestle Eliza to take her clothes off and plunge her into
the steaming bathtub. Her screams of protest resound throughout the residence:
&Get your hands off me! No! I won't! Let go of me!&
While the two maids carry off Eliza's clothes, Higgins is
asked by the morally-responsible Pickering if he will take advantage of
Eliza under the circumstances: &I hope
it's clearly understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position...This
is no trifling matter. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?&
The confirmed, aloof, hyper-logical bachelor/professor expresses his feelings
about women in words and song: &I find the moment that a woman makes friends
with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance.
And I find the moment that I make friends with a woman, I become selfish
tyrannical. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain
The snobbish professor contemptuously sings-talks that he is a &quiet living
man& without the need for a woman in &An Ordinary Man&:
I'm an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than just an ordinary
to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants.
An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free
Doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well, just an ordinary man
But, let a woman in your life and your serenity is through
She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome
Then go to the enthralling fun of overhauling you
Let a woman in your life, and you're up against a wall,
Make a plan and you will find, she has something else in mind,
And so rather than do either you do something else that neither likes at
You want to talk of Keats or Milton, she only wants to talk of love
You go to see a play or ballet, and spend it searching for her glove
Let a woman in your life and you invite eternal strife,
Let them buy their wedding bands for those anxious little hands
I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling, than to ever let
a woman in my life...
In another line, he confirms his incorrigible bachelorhood
and his impatience and distaste for creatures of the female sex: &Let a
woman in your life and you're plunging in a knife. Let the others of my
sex tie the knot around their necks, I'd prefer a new edition of the Spanish
Inquisition than to ever let a woman in my life.&
In Covent Garden after being thrown out of a pub, a besotted,
lazy Doolittle and his friends ponder how to escape work. Eliza's father,
a dustman and scoundrel, answers the question by singing: &With A Little Bit O' Luck&,
explaining in
part, how he lives a life of unwedded bliss:
The Lord above gave man an arm of iron, so he could do his job
and never shirk
The Lord above gave man an arm of iron but, with a little bit o' luck,
With a little bit o' luck, Someone else'll do the blinkin' work!
The Lord above made liquor for temptation, to see if man could turn away
The Lord above made liquor for temptation but, with a little bit o' luck,
With a little bit o' luck, When temptation comes, you'll give right in!..
Oh you can walk the straight and narrow, but with a little bit o' luck
you'll run amuck.
The gentle sex was made for man to marry, to share his nest and see his
food is cooked.
The gentle sex was made for man to marry but, with a little bit o' luck,
With a little bit o' luck, You can have it all and not get hooked!
An old Cockney woman calls out to Alfred from a basement-level window where
Eliza used to reside (three days earlier) that he is a lucky man because
daughter is being 'kept' by a wealthy man:
You can buy your own things now, Alfie Doolittle, fallen into a
tub of butter, you have...Your daughter Eliza...Moved in with a swell,
has...this morning, I gets a message from her. She wants her things
to 27A Wimpole Street, care of Professor Higgins. And what
things does she
want?...Her birdcage, and a Chinese fan. But she says,
'Never mind about sending
any clothes.'
Alfred celebrates his luck by finishing up his song: &A
man was made to help support his children, which is the right and proper
thing to do. A man was made to help support his children but, with a little
bit o' luck, with a little bit o' luck, they'll go out and start supporting}