My Fair Lady (1964)

My Fair Lady (1964)

One of "my favorite movies" though it should have starred Julie Andrews who starred with Rex Harrison on Broadway. In a bit of Oscar irony Ms. Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar playing Mary Poppins (1964) and Ms. Hepburn wasn’t even nominated. Alan Jay Lerner’s musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s classic Pygmalion (1938) story. The film won 8 (out of 12 nominations) Oscars including Best Picture Best Actor for Harrison and Best Director for George Cukor (his first on his fifth and last nomination … 31 years after Little Women (1933)). Gladys Cooper and the marvelous Stanley Holloway were nominated for their supporting roles. #91 on AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies list. #12 on AFI’s 100 Greatest Love Stories list. "I Could Have Danced All Night" is #17 on AFI’s 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time. #8 on AFI’s 25 Greatest Movie Musicals list.

Harrison plays the great pompous linguist professor Henry Higgins who says that the way one speaks reveals everything about them. He claims he can teach any ignorant street person to speak such that they could be passed off as royalty. A fellow linguist & newfound friend Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) calls his bluff. So Higgins chooses to undertake an unkempt cockney-accented flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Hepburn) to prove his boast & make his point. When he takes Eliza into his home to live with him and the visiting Pickering during the training period her estranged & drunken father (Holloway) gets the wrong idea and wants a piece of the action. He "sells" his daughter to Higgins who recommends the man to an associate as a true "moralist". Cooper plays Higgins’ disapproving mother. Theodore Bikel plays a former student of the Professor’s that becomes the ultimate test of his hypothesis. Jeremy Brett plays a gentleman lovestruck by his first encounter with Eliza. Mona Washbourne plays Higgins’ live-in servant.

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