Albums: My Fair Lady OBCR

My Fair Lady is an Academy Award-winning 1964 film adaptation of the stage musical, My Fair Lady, based in turn on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The film was directed by George Cukor and stars Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), an arrogant, irascible professor of phonetics, boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), that he can teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess - even Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a young woman with a horrendous Cockney accent who is selling flowers on the street.

After overhearing this, Eliza finds her way to the professor's house and offers to pay for speech lessons, so that she may become a lady in a flower shop. Pickering is intrigued and wagers that Higgins cannot make good on his claim; Higgins takes Eliza on as a challenge of his skills free of charge. Eliza's father, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), a dustman, arrives three days later, ostensibly to protect his daughter's virtue, but in reality simply to extract some money from Higgins, and is bought off with £5.

Higgins is impressed by the man's genuineness, natural gift for language and especially his brazen lack of morals ("Can't afford 'em!"). Eliza goes through many forms of speech training, such as speaking with marbles in her mouth and trying to recite the sentence "In Hertford, Hereford, Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen" without dropping the 'h', and to say "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" rather than "The rine in spine sties minely in the pline". At first, she makes no progress, but just as she and Higgins and Pickering are exhausted and about to give up, she tries one more time and finally "gets it", as she begins to speak with an impeccable upper class English accent.

Higgins takes her on her first public appearance to Ascot Racecourse, where she makes a good impression with her stilted, but genteel manners, only to shock everyone by a sudden and vulgar lapse into Cockney, ("C'mon Dover, move your bloomin' 'orse!") especially as the Cockney slang "'orse" sounds like the British swear word "arse". Higgins, who dislikes the pretentiousness of the upper class, partly conceals a grin behind his hand, as if to say "I wish I had said that!" The bet is won when Eliza successfully poses as a mysterious lady of patently noble rank at the 'embassy ball', despite the unexpected presence of a Hungarian phonetics expert trained by Higgins. Higgins' callous treatment of Eliza afterwards, especially his indifference to her future prospects, leads her to walk out on him, leaving him mystified by her ingratitude.

When she is gone, he comes to the horrified realization that he has "grown accustomed to her face" (the closest he can come to acknowledging that he is in love with her). The film ends with Eliza returning to Higgins, much to his satisfaction. This differs from the original play's resolution (see Pygmalion ending).

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