My Fair Lady
George Cukor (1964)
Hit stage musicals turned into hit movie musicals of the 1960s were determined to end more happily than the classics of English literature from which they derived or, at least, a bit less unhappily. Even in West Side Story (1961), and though it’s scant consolation to her, Juliet/Maria survives to mourn the death of Romeo/Tony. In Oliver! (1968), the out-and-out villain, Bill Sikes, is duly killed but the entertaining one, Fagin, avoids the hangman’s noose and finally sings about changing his nefarious ways. George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion ends with Professor Henry Higgins alone on stage. He chuckles to himself at the absurdity of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower-seller whom Higgins has turned into a lady, marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, an upper-class twit – but that, it seems, is what Eliza, who has now abandoned Higgins, is going to do. In the last moments of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Eliza, after walking out of Higgins’ life, walks back into it. He loses no time in making clear to her and the audience that he hasn’t changed his ways. Eliza suddenly has changed, though. The man who taught her good manners and impeccable diction also infuriated Eliza by treating her as a skivvy – enough for her to throw Higgins’ slippers at him. Just a couple of scenes ago, when he asked her to come back to him, she coolly suggested that was because ‘You want me back to pick up your slippers’. Higgins, in the film’s closing line, archly asks, ‘Where the devil are my slippers?’ After he’s had the last word, Eliza smiles fondly and moves towards him.
I last saw Pygmalion at the Old Vic in 2023. There was a lot wrong with the production, but that didn’t include Bertie Carvel’s unequivocal portrait of the leading man: Carvel made clear that Henry Higgins, internationally renowned professor of phonetics, was a middle-aged mother’s boy, incapable of developing adult relationships; at the play’s end, he stood very thoroughly isolated. I first saw My Fair Lady in the cinema in late 1967, soon after my twelfth birthday. I can remember feeling let down, even then, by the supposedly happy ending, almost indignant on Eliza’s behalf. I didn’t realise at the time how much this had to do with Rex Harrison as a performer. My Fair Lady’s ending appears to vindicate Higgins: despite being a childish chauvinist, he’s also meant to be irresistible – which may be possible if the man playing him shows some chinks of authentic vulnerability in Higgins’ egotistical armour. Forget that with Harrison in the role. The character’s self-satisfaction is indivisible from the actor’s. Self-satisfaction is Harrison’s trademark – in evidence, before and after this performance, in films as otherwise unalike as Unfaithfully Yours (1948), The Reluctant Debutante (1958) and Doctor Dolittle (1967).
Rex Harrison is the definitive Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady. He originated the part on Broadway and in the West End before playing it in Cukor’s picture. It’s a celebrated, Tony-and-Oscar-winning performance. It’s widely assumed too that, in performing Higgins’ songs, Harrison invented speak-singing in musicals. (His success in My Fair Lady certainly helped popularise the technique, but that’s not quite the same thing.) When an actor replays in a film a part they’ve already played in a successful theatre run, they can seem too comfortable and practised in the role on screen. Their performance looks to have been fully worked out on stage – has become accomplished in the wrong way. Harrison gives that impression throughout Cukor’s film, but something worse happens in the single scene between Higgins and Eliza’s father, Alfred – with Stanley Holloway also reprising his role in My Fair Lady’s original productions on both sides of the Atlantic. In this exchange, one actor (usually Harrison) sometimes anticipates, in a facial reaction or the delivery of a line, what the other actor is saying before he’s finished saying it – because he knows so well what’s coming.
The film’s other main role was, notoriously, not played by its stage originator in New York and London. My Fair Lady was a Warner Bros production and Jack Warner decided that Julie Andrews lacked the box-office appeal needed to ensure the film’s commercial success. (My Fair Lady was eventually made for $17m – equivalent to around $200m nowadays, so considerably more than the budget for, say, Barbie (2023) or Wicked (2024).) Andrews would no doubt have done her own singing. The film’s Eliza, Audrey Hepburn, is dubbed by Marni Nixon, but that’s not all that’s wrong with the performance for the first hour or so. As Eliza – to quote Higgins, a ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’, a ‘squashed cabbage leaf’, etc – Hepburn makes disastrous attempts to come across as downtrodden and to speak broad Cockney. Higgins likens Eliza’s voice to that of a ‘bilious pigeon’: Hepburn is painful to listen to, but because she’s so effortful. It makes the press ridicule of Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in the same year’s Mary Poppins (in which Julie Andrews enjoyed a huge success) seem very unfair. At least Van Dyke’s accent was fluent, even if it was a strain of Cockney never heard within the sound of Bow Bells.
Audrey Hepburn hits rock bottom early in the famous episode that culminates in ‘The Rain in Spain’ and, hot on its heels, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. Higgins orders Eliza to elocute ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen’: Hepburn drops each aitch laboriously. But when, a few screen minutes later, Eliza succeeds in doing as she’s told (‘By George, she’s got it!), it’s also the turning point in Hepburn’s performance. Once she’s allowed to speak ladylike, even while Eliza’s posh accent is still precarious, Hepburn is freed to act and charm like her usual self. Julie Andrews’ biggest fans wouldn’t claim she could have looked as Audrey Hepburn does in the scenes at Ascot and the embassy ball. Nor could Andrews have been as emotionally expressive as Hepburn is, once Eliza realises she’s falling for Higgins, then rebels against his tyranny. Without Hepburn’s vivacious truthfulness, which illumines Eliza’s longing, the heroine would seem insane as she euphorically sings, ‘I only know when he began to dance with me …’ Rex Harrison, as a partner, gives her nothing – not even romantic inaccessibility.
Audrey Hepburn was born exquisite, which makes for another apparent similarity between My Fair Lady and Oliver Twist – Dickens’ novel as well as screen versions of the story. Despite his workhouse origins, Oliver is well-spoken, a quality that reflects both a nobility of spirit and the social class from which he’s descended and to which he’ll eventually return: Dickens, for all his fierce social conscience, seems to view that as a return home for Oliver. Eliza Doolittle is a different matter, not only in Pygmalion but in Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay for My Fair Lady, too. Eliza, when she turns against Higgins, tells him that, by making her a lady, he’s turned her into a social misfit. It’s in this respect that Audrey Hepburn is a problem in the role throughout the film. She’s so innately classy that, once she’s speaking beautifully, Hepburn’s Eliza seems to become her true self, not at all a distortion of it.
Even so, Hepburn’s talent and allure make the second half of My Fair Lady much easier to watch than the first, because she’s more at ease and because Eliza largely dominates the film’s later stages, as Higgins seemed to dominate at the start. To be fair to Rex Harrison, he’s far from the only problem. Many people consider My Fair Lady a triumphant climax to George Cukor’s long and distinguished career but I’m not among them. The opening titles appear against images of glorious flowers, in predominantly pastel shades, while the Lerner and Loewe show’s greatest hits play on the soundtrack. The floral images are still photographs: they hint at both the decorative splendour and the visual lethargy of what’s to come over the next (nearly) three hours. Cecil Beaton’s set and costume designs are wonderful creations, almost always on display. It was interesting to see My Fair Lady again quite soon after revisiting, also after a long interval, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), in which the opulent settings are vitally inhabited by the people within them. Cukor’s film could hardly be more different. Inertia is essential, of course, in the ‘Ascot Gavotte’ sequence, where the upper-crust racegoers’ frozen attitudes and implacable dispassion harmonise with the superbly limited palette of Beaton’s outfits (black and white, grey and cream). You can also accept the static quality of the embassy ball, to the extent that this is another top-drawer social ritual. That doesn’t explain, though, why those attending the ball look so ill at ease (look, in other words, like a bunch of extras unsure of what to do). Both at Ascot and the ball, Eliza, thanks to Audrey Hepburn, is just about the only person on the screen who looks comfortable in what she’s wearing.
It’s in the musical scenes in and around Covent Garden, though, a place supposedly brimming with proletarian life, that Cukor’s direction is most deficient. Stanley Holloway’s workshy Alfred Doolittle certainly doesn’t lack performing energy. There are times when Holloway seems almost literally to be playing to the gallery, as if he were still on stage. But he does a good job of conveying Doolittle’s dodgy charm – and his brio and rhythm, in both his voice and movement, are sorely needed. The bit players with whom Holloway must interact are mechanical; other members of the Covent Garden chorus traipse round cluelessly. Thanks to this and some peculiar editing choices, ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and, especially, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ are arrhythmic. In the film’s non-singing bits, Cukor has a maddening habit of holding characters’ reaction shots for much too long. Actors as good as Mona Washbourne, who plays Higgins’ housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, hang around on screen telling us what to read from their expression long after we’ve read it.
My Fair Lady’s collection of songs is rightly esteemed yet two of the most famous numbers don’t make great sense in the context of the narrative. You understand why ‘On the Street Where You Live’, with its lovely, sweeping melody and deeply felt lyrics, became a standard; you don’t understand why the song is given to Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who’s otherwise written, and tends to be played, as a figure of fun. Jeremy Brett’s casting as Freddy here, even though Brett gives one of the film’s most likeable performances, confuses the issue further. There’s a comic spark between him and Audrey Hepburn, in their conversation at Ascot; this and Brett’s good looks combine to leave you puzzled why Eliza really doesn’t marry Freddy. Brett also does a nice job not only of lip-syncing to the dubbed voice of Bill Shirley for ‘On the Street Where You Live’ but also of expressing the feeling in Shirley’s singing. Yet the staging of the number is feeble: ‘People stop and stare – they don’t bother me’ is a pointless assertion in an empty street. Later, on the same street, a puzzled, crestfallen Higgins returns home Eliza-less. Even I’ll admit that Rex Harrison’s rendition of ‘I’ve Accustomed to Her Face’ is a feat (Harrison’s better when he doesn’t have to share the screen). It might even be touching, if only you believed a word of what he’s speak-singing. ‘Her joys, her woes, her highs, her lows/Are second nature to me now’ – pull the other one, Professor Harrison-Higgins.
Gladys Cooper plays her few scenes as Higgins’ mother with easy authority. As Colonel Pickering, Higgins’ fellow phonetician and, for most of the film, house guest, Wilfrid Hyde-White has much more screen time – too much, given that Hyde-White is just doing his usual eccentric-urbane routine. It’s rather bizarre when Eliza scolds Higgins by telling him Colonel Pickering has always treated her as a lady, when Pickering has often seemed as oblivious to her feelings as Higgins is, just less explicitly rude. You have to agree with Pickering, though, when he tells Higgins that ‘one thing I can’t stand about you [is] your confounded complacency’. In the impossible role of Zoltan Karpathy, the full-of-himself linguistics expert who threatens to unmask Higgins’ protégée as a fraud at the embassy ball, Theodore Bikel is less annoying than the part deserves. Karpathy, a Hungarian, makes a fool of himself by declaring Eliza also to be Hungarian, and blue-blooded – a princess. Since she’s aristocratic Audrey Hepburn, you have some sympathy with Karpathy’s mistake.
The gestation of My Fair Lady‘s happy ending was a longer process than Lionel Bart’s decision to reprieve Fagin in Oliver! Even though Pygmalion’s first production in 1914 was a success, some audience members, critics and even the play’s first Henry Higgins, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, regretted the downbeat finale. According to Wikipedia, ‘Tree sought to sweeten Shaw’s ending to please himself and his record houses. Shaw remained sufficiently irritated to add a postscript essay to the 1916 print edition, “What Happened Afterwards”, for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married’. He even wrote to Mrs Patrick Campbell, the first Eliza, that ‘When Eliza emancipates herself – when Galatea comes to life – she must not relapse. She must retain her pride and triumph to the end’.
When Pygmalion became a British cinema film in 1938, Shaw, who wrote the screen adaptation, was prepared to compromise with a conclusion that allowed Higgins and Eliza a ‘tender farewell scene … followed by one showing Freddy and Eliza happy in their greengrocery-cum-flower shop’ (Wikipedia again). It was only at a private preview of the final film, directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, who played Higgins to Wendy Hiller’s Eliza, that Shaw discovered that the producer, Gabriel Pascal, had decided to end proceedings with Eliza returning to Higgins. History doesn’t record whether GBS was at all consoled by winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Pygmalion (though it does record that he was the first man ever to win an Oscar as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature – an achievement unmatched until Bob Dylan completed the double in 2016). Eliza Doolittle’s unprepared for, last-minute change of heart depends, for its emotional effectiveness, on the chemistry between the players in the two main roles. Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller have it. Despite Audrey Hepburn’s best efforts, she and Rex Harrison don’t. The only way I can cope with My Fair Lady’ s abominable ending is by imagining that in a parallel universe, once Higgins mentioned the slippers, Eliza had second thoughts and made for the exit.
21 March 2026