My Fair Lady

"I find the moment that I make friends with a woman I become selfish and tyrannical." - As opposed to all the rest of the time? This is my favorite movie musical and probably my favorite movie that is not part of a trilogy or something like that. You should probably know that both Audrey Hepburn and Jeremy Brett had their voices dubbed for the singing parts. In Shaw's original 1913 play Pygmalion Eliza does not return to Higgins and it is implied that she won't; in the 1938 film version, for which Shaw wrote the screenplay, he insisted that his contract guarantee that no dialogue not written by him would be used, so that the studio couldn't arrange a romantic pairing of Higgins and Eliza (or Liza, as she's called in that play and movie). But the studio got around this by including a closing scene with no new dialogue, just Higgins' machines playing back earlier dialogue and Eliza quoting her own earlier words; the Broadway and film versions of My Fair Lady kept this scene, although I don't think any version really implies the romantic connection that Shaw dreaded, just a restoration of friendship. Rex Harrison, who played Higgins in both the stage and screen versions of My Fair Lady, was initially reluctant to take the part because he felt that any performance he could give would be unfavorably compared to Leslie Howard in the 1938 Pygmalion film; Leslie Howard is wonderful, but I think most would agree that Harrison's performance absolutely blows his out of the water. The Embassy Ball sequence was added by Shaw for the 1938 film, as were the "rain in Spain" and "Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire" speech exercises; none of these things were in the 1913 play. My Fair Lady won Oscars for best film, director, actor, art and set design, costumes, cinematography, etc. Audrey Hepburn, great as she was, was not even nominated for best actress, probably because so many Academy members resented the fact that the role had not gone to Julie Andrews, who had scored such a hit with it on Broadway - but she'd never made a movie yet, and Jack Warner wanted a known bankable star (which of course Harrison, unlike Andrews, already certainly was). Because she wasn't cast in My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews was available to make Mary Poppins, which came out the same year and for which she won the best actress Oscar, and in her acceptance speech she thanked Jack Warner for making this possible. Oh, and one last thing: Eliza's shout of "Come on, Dover, move your bloomin' arse" in My Fair Lady takes the place of by far the most famous line in Pygmalion, where in conversation Eliza tells the others present that it is "not bloody likely" that she will go home in anything but a taxi. It's hard to exaggerate what an extreme obscenity the word "bloody" was considered to be in 1913 England, and audiences were genuinely shocked; the actress delivering the line (one of the most famous actresses in the world at that time) actually feared that delivering that line my imperil her career. For decades after the play came out, anyone wanting to convey the effect of saying "bloody" without actually uttering the word could substitute the word "Pygmalion." But obviously in 1956 America, when the Broadway musical came out, the word would not have the same effect, and so the whole scene was moved to the Ascot racetrack and the new line took the place of the old.