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My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.The story, based on the 1938 film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady.
Eliza Doolittle is a fictional character and the protagonist in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913) and its 1956 musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. Eliza (from Lisson Grove , London ) is a Cockney flower seller, who comes to Professor Henry Higgins asking for elocution lessons, after a chance encounter at Covent Garden .
- Professor Henry Higgins. Henry Higgins is a professor of phonetics who plays Pygmalion to Eliza Doolittle's Galatea. He is the author of Higgins' Universal Alphabet, believes in concepts like visible speech, and uses all manner of recording and photographic material to document his phonetic subjects, reducing people and their dialects into what he sees as readily understandable units.
- Eliza Doolittle. "She is not at all a romantic figure." So is she introduced in Act I. Everything about Eliza Doolittle seems to defy any conventional notions we might have about the romantic heroine.
- Colonel Pickering. Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanskrit, is a match for Higgins (although somewhat less obsessive) in his passion for phonetics.
- Alfred Doolittle. Alfred Doolittle is Eliza's father, an elderly but vigorous dustman who has had at least six wives and who "seems equally free from fear and conscience."
- Plot
- Cast
- Production
- Release
- Critical Reception
- Restoration
- See Also
- References
- External Links
In London, Professor Henry Higgins, a scholar of phonetics, believes that one's accent determines a person's prospects in society ("Why Can't the English?"). At the Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable market one evening, he listens to Eliza Doolittle, a young flower seller with a strong Cockney accent, and makes notes. This causes others to suspect h...
Audrey Hepburn as Eliza DoolittleCBS head William S. Paley made an arrangement where CBS would finance the original Broadway production in exchange for the rights to the cast album (through Columbia Records). Warner Bros. then purchased the film rights from CBS in February 1962 for the then-unprecedented sum of $5.5 million (equivalent to $55 million in 2023) plus 47¼% of the gros...
The film had its premiere at the Criterion Theatre in New York on Wednesday, October 21, 1964, with its regular run starting the following day with a $500,000 advance.It ran for 87 weeks at the theatre.
Contemporary
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times opened his contemporary review: "As Henry Higgins might have whooped, 'By George, they've got it!' They've made a superlative film from the musical stage show My Fair Lady—a film that enchantingly conveys the rich endowments of the famous stage production in a fresh and flowing cinematic form." Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Timesreported from the New York premiere that "when the curtains came together at the finish of just three hours, three hours...
Retrospective
Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebertgave the film four stars out of four, and, in 2006, he put it on his "Great Movies" list, praising Hepburn's performance, and calling the film "the best and most unlikely of musicals." James Berardinelli wrote in a 2018 retrospective review, "Few genres of films are as magical as musicals, and few musicals are as intelligent and lively as My Fair Lady.It's a classic not because a group of stuffy film experts have labeled it as such, but because it has been,...
Today
As of 2023, My Fair Lady holds a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 91 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10. The consensus states: "George Cukor's elegant, colorful adaptation of the beloved stage play is elevated to new heights thanks to winning performances by Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison." On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 95 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
The film was restored in 1994 by James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris, who had restored Spartacus three years earlier. The restoration was commissioned and financed by CBS, to which the film rights reverted from Warner Bros. in 1971.CBS later hired Harris to lend his expertise to a new 4K restoration of the film for a 2015 Blu-ray release, working fr...
Bibliography
1. Lees, Gene (2005). The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe. Bison Books. ISBN 978-0-8032-8040-3. 2. Green, Benny, ed. (1987). A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner. Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 0-87910-109-1. 3. Lerner, Alan Jay (1985). The Street Where I Live. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80602-9.
My Fair Lady at IMDbMy Fair Lady at AllMovieMy Fair Lady at the American Film Institute CatalogMy Fair Lady at Box Office MojoHenry Higgins, fictional character, a professor of phonetics who makes a bet that he can teach Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (performed 1913). The story was filmed in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Henry Higgins, and was.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sep 25, 2024 · It was performed in England in 1914, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. The play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. Henry Higgins, a phonetician, accepts a bet that simply by changing the speech of a Cockney flower seller he will be able, in six months, to pass her off as a duchess. Eliza undergoes grueling ...
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Eliza Doolittle Character Analysis. Eliza Doolittle. First introduced as the flower-girl in Act One, and called variously Liza, Eliza, and Miss Doolittle, Eliza is the subject of Higgins and Pickering's experiment and bet. While not formally well-educated, she is quick-witted and is a strong character, generally unafraid to stand up for herself ...
