This is from a song near the end, fittingly titled “ A Hymn to Him,” in which Higgins asks “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”: Take, for example, the undisguised misogyny in nearly all of Henry Higgins’s songs (spoken, with droll irony, by Rex Harrison). It’s about a strong woman attempting to retain her identity in spite of the controlling machinations of a small-minded man. Their musical is not about a genius attempting to transform a weak woman. But thanks to Lerner and Loewe’s songs, My Fair Lady critiques that narrative as much as it upholds it. The burning question mark of this sumptuous adaptation is Audrey Hepburn’s casting as Eliza, the role that Julie Andrews had clearly been born to play….after a slow start, when the practiced proficiency of her cockney dialect suggests that Actress Hepburn is really only slumming, she warms her way into a graceful, glamorous performance, the best of her career.įrom Ancient Greece to Edwardian England to 1960s Hollywood, the narrative remains the same: an overbearing male “genius” who transforms a pliable (read: vulnerable) woman from her meager, inadequate self into his personal ideal of womanhood.
#Julie andrews as eliza doolittle movie#
As TIME wrote after the movie came out in 1964: “I knew Audrey Hepburn had never made a financial flop.” But Andrews got the last word - losing the My Fair Lady role allowed her to make Mary Poppins, for which she won a Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress.Īudrey herself was still pretty good, even if she had to have her songs dubbed by another singer.
“With all her charm and ability, Julie Andrews was just a Broadway name known primarily to those who saw the play,” Jack Warner wrote in his 1965 autobiography My First Hundred Years in Hollywood. But studio head Jack Warner didn’t think Julie Andrews had the name recognition or glamor to carry a major motion picture. Julie Andrews had played Eliza on Broadway, and had already mastered the character and the vocals, and her stage co-star Rex Harrison was going to play Higgins in the movie. in She’s All That, of which Ovid was reportedly a mega-fan).Įven studio execs are always trying to cultivate the perfect girl, and that led to a bit of behind-the-scenes drama when it came to casting Eliza Doolittle. That part of Metamorphosis was based on every guy who ever thought he could create the girl of his dreams (specifically, Freddie Prinze Jr. The musical was based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion, which was itself based on the part in Ovid’s Metamorphosis when a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with his statue of the perfect woman. First, a little history: The 1964 Audrey Hepburn movie version of My Fair Lady is based on the Broadway musical (starring Julie Andrews) with songs written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.
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