MACTUnless you’re completely unaware of the history of musical theater, you must know that My Fair Lady is one of the theater’s most phenomenal musicals. Adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s own treatment of his play, Pygmalion, (the 1938 film version for which he won an Oscar), its success is overwhelming. However, after seeing The Chocolate Soldier, based on Arms and the Man, Shaw disapproved of more musicals based on his work. (When the film version of The Chocolate Soldier went into production, the source material was replaced with Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman).
Following Shaw’s death in 1950, producer Gabriel Pascal determined to create a musical based on Pygmalion. He approached Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, but both teams realized the story wouldn’t work within the standards of modern musical comedy. Lerner went to Hollywood, while Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote The King and I. Following the success of Paint Your Wagon (1951), Lerner and Loewe decided to give Shaw another try.
By late 1955, a script and score were good enough to begin production. Attorney and producer Herman Levin, along with CBS funded the show. Moss Hart was signed to direct, with Hanya Holm handling the choreography. The role of Henry Higgins was offered to Noel Coward who immediately recommended Rex Harrison. Mary Martin was the original choice for Eliza Doolittle but she turned it down in favor of other projects. Stanley Holloway was perfectly cast as Alfred P. Doolittle; Cathleen Nesbitt played Henry’s mother; Robert Coote was cast as Col. Pickering and Christopher Hewitt (Mr. Belvedere on television) played Zoltan Karparthy, with John Michael King as Freddy.
Already a British music hall star since childhood, Julie Andrews was cast as Eliza, her second Broadway role following Polly in The Boy Friend. However, during rehearsals, Harrison threw a tantrum because Andrews wasn’t getting the character right. To keep him from leaving the show, Andrews and Moss Hart spent a weekend alone perfecting the character we all know and love.
In previews, the musical sold out in New Haven and then in Philadelphia, guaranteeing My Fair Lady would be a tremendous success. It opened on Broadway on 15 March 1956 at the Mark Hellinger Theatre (now the Times Square Church) and won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Harrison won the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical, but the Best Actress award went to Judy Holliday for Bells Are Ringing. (Julie Andrews has never won a competitive Tony Award).
When Harrison, Andrews, Coote and Holloway left in 1958 to repeat their triumph in London, Edward Mulhare, Sally Ann Howes and Melville Cooper replaced them. My Fair Lady ran for over six years, closing after 2,717 performances. It was the longest-running musical until it was topped, first by Hello, Dolly!, then A Chorus Line and several others. The Original Cast Recording has been a best-seller for more than half a century.
Many consider My Fair Lady the perfect musical. Because of the score, it’s certainly among the most romantic.
Jack L. Warner purchased the property for $5 million and proceeded to assemble a film version. The logical first choice for director was Vincente Minnelli, who’d created such great movie musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris and Bells Are Ringing. Minnelli turned it down, having already directed a similar story with Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi.
Never mind. George Cukor (1899-1983) was the perfect director.
Cukor’s career began as the silent era gave way to sound. Among his best films are What Price Hollywood?, A Bill of Divorcement, Little Women, Dinner at Eight, Romeo and Juliet, Camille, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, Born Yesterday and My Fair Lady. He made ten films with Katharine Hepburn, and was the original director Gone With the Wind, however David O. Selznick was unsatisfied with Cukor’s work, and replaced him with Victor Fleming. This freed Cukor to direct the 1939 film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play, The Women, casting many of MGM’s contract players who’d been potential Scarlett O’Hara’s, including Paulette Goddard and Joan Crawford, both of whom came very close to playing Scarlett.
My Fair Lady is perhaps his greatest achievement in cinema. It earned Cukor his only Oscar for Best Director. After both Cary Grant and James Cagney turned Warner down, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway recreated their stage performances. Wilfred Hyde-White played Pickering; Jeremy Brett was cast as Freddy; Mona Washburne played Mrs. Cooper, with Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Higgins and Theodore Bikel as Zoltan Karparthy. Others in the cast included Angela Lansbury’s mother Moira MacGill, as Lady Boxington (she wears a rather large black hat with a puffy white feather) in the Ascot scene and the Baroness Rothschild making her only film appearance as the Queen of Transylvania. She was uncredited and passed away a year later.
Because Warner wanted an established star to play Eliza Doolittle, he passed on Julie Andrews and instead cast Audrey Hepburn, starting an unending controversy that’s still being debated. Hepburn had done her own singing in Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Moon River), but rather than having Musical Director Andre Previn transpose the music to fit her voice, Hepburn was dubbed by Marni Nixon. (You do hear Hepburn singing bits and pieces throughout the film, usually introducing a song only to have Nixon’s voice abruptly take over).
Nixon had famously dubbed Marilyn Monroe’s high notes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She dubbed Deborah Kerr in The King & I; Natalie Wood in West Side Story (as well as her high notes in Gypsy) and was June Foray’s singing voice for Mulan. She was seen onscreen as Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music.
Warner put the movie into production in late 1963. It used two soundstages, one specifically needed for make-up and costumes. The film opens with images of flowers throughout the overture and credit sequence. While Harrison had starred in such films as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Major Barbara, Blithe Spirit, Cleopatra and Anna and the King of Siam, Audrey Hepburn was given top billing. It’s quite evident that Cecil Beaton was in charge of designing the Costumes, Scenery and Production. His attention to detail is remarkable. The first time I walked into Covent Garden Market, I was overwhelmed because in reality it looks exactly the way it does in the movie.
As patrons file out of the Opera House it starts to rain, so the scene shifts to the portico of St. Paul Actor’s Church, (complete with the plaque commemorating the first Punch and Judy Show performed there). Eliza’s basket of flowers is knocked from her hands by Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and she sits on a pillar trying to fix two bundles of violets. She speaks to Col. Pickering and the plot is set in motion as Henry Higgins questions why so many British don’t speak correctly. (“Why Can’t the English?”)
He brags to Col. Pickering that he could make Eliza into a lady in six months, which piques her curiosity. Before he and Pickering head off to supper, Higgins tosses some pence into her basket and exits with Pickering. This leads into “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and at one point, Liza fans herself with a cabbage leaf.
As daylight grows, groups of workers move into Covent Garden Market, freezing in position as the camera pulls back, revealing more workers arriving. Among these is Eliza’s father, Alfie P. Doolittle, hoping for a handout, but receiving not so much as a “brass farthing.” When Eliza shares some of her earnings with him, he goes to the pub, singing about “A Little Bit of Luck.” Eliza goes to Higgins’ residence.
Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay adds scenes to further open up the story to develop plot and character. An early example of this is the scene after Higgins and Pickering decide to teach Eliza. Mrs. Pearce bundles her off for her first-ever bath. One difference between the stage and film versions is that, while the interval occurs after the Embassy Ball onstage, it takes place before the ball in the film. As she descends the staircase, Audrey Hepburn has never been more beautiful onscreen.
The story remains to be extremely misogynistic, but Lerner has given Higgins more humanity in the film, so it was wise to have Cukor capture Harrison’s performance for posterity. The troublesome ending of the story is the same as the 1938 film version with Eliza returning to Higgins. This will always remain troublesome.
There are a pair of Easter Eggs in the film. During the Embassy Ball, the man who bring Eliza to meet the Queen of Transylvania is Alan Napier, who, two years later would play Alfred on the TV series, Batman. When Alfie Doolittle returns to the pub asking that his pals “Get Me to the Church on Time,” he dances with a mature blonde. That actress is Barbara Pepper, who played a lot of gun molls in movies before being cast in her most famous role, Doris Ziffel on the TV series, Green Acres.
The film was shot by Harry Stradling, Sr. The cinematographer had begun his career in the silents, but he also shot the 1938 version of Pygmalion, and his work includes Jamaica Inn, A Streetcar Named Desire, Auntie Mame and Barbra Streisand’s first four films. While Cecil Beaton was given most of the credit, My Fair Lady was the last film for production designer Gene Allen, who assisted Beaton. Hermes Pan, whose film work includes over 50 musicals, staged the dances uncredited.
My Fair Lady was an immediate success, earning eight Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Production Design. While Audrey Hepburn was not nominated, Julie Andrews won the Oscar for her first film, Mary Poppins.
Debbie Reynolds’ pet project for the last forty plus years of her life was to create a Hollywood Museum, but the suits wouldn’t listen. She had three warehouses full of props and costumes, all bought at auctions when the studios downsized and sold their stock. Reynolds filed for bankruptcy three times because of this project, and it took 5 auctions to sell off her collection. Among the items auctioned was Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot Dress, which sold for $3.7 million. Reynolds passed away in 2016, but there’s now an Academy Awards Museum. The Museum has started displaying items now owned by Reynolds’ son, Todd Fisher.
I have seen five stage productions, in the past half-century. The first was a long high-school production that took 4 hours because the conductor hadn’t listened to any recordings, so the orchestrations were slowed to a crawl. I walked out of two productions, including the last one I saw, a few years ago in London (see below). In 1978, I saw a tour at the Orpheum in Minneapolis. Ann Rogers played Eliza shrill and ignorant; the Alfie Doolittle couldn’t even follow the conductor and the production left much to be desired, but on the other hand Edward Mulhare was a marvelous Higgins and they brought the original sets on tour.
The best production I saw was at Lincoln Center in New York. Harry Hadden-Paton was an excellent Higgins; Allan Corduner played Pickering; Diana Rigg was Mrs. Higgins; Norbert Leo Butz was Alfie Doolittle and Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) was a superb Eliza.
Director Bartlett Sher created a subtle ending that worked, too. It’s too bad this production, replicated in London, wasn’t good at all, but that was the Eliza’s fault. How could anyone appreciate an angry Eliza?
There were plans to remake My Fair Lady. Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility) wrote a new screenplay and John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) was signed to direct. However, the project was shelved ten years ago.
Instead, the film was restored in time for its 50th anniversary. We saw a clean print, color-corrected and a refreshened soundtrack. It took a long time, but I’ve come to realize that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Audrey Hepburn’s performance, either. My Fair Lady is a great movie musical!