Higgins recommends Alfred to a wealthy American who is interested in morality.Įliza endures Higgins' demanding teaching methods and treatment of her personally ("Just You Wait"), while the servants feel both annoyed with the noise as well as pitiful for Higgins ("Servants' Chorus"). Higgins is impressed by the man's honesty, his natural gift for language, and especially his brazen lack of morals. He shows up at Higgins' house three days later, ostensibly to protect his daughter's virtue, but in reality to extract some money from Higgins, and is bought off with £5. Doolittle, a dustman, learns of his daughter's new residence ("With a Little Bit of Luck"). ![]() Higgins agrees and describes how women ruin lives ("I'm an Ordinary Man").Įliza's father, Alfred P. Pickering is intrigued and offers to cover all the attendant expenses if Higgins succeeds. The following morning, Eliza shows up at Higgins' home, seeking lessons. Eliza's ambition is to work in a flower shop, but her accent makes that impossible ("Wouldn't It Be Loverly"). Higgins boasts he could teach even Eliza Doolittle, the young flower seller woman with a strong Cockney accent, to speak so well he could pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. ![]() At the Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable market one evening, he meets Colonel Hugh Pickering, himself a phonetics expert who had come from India to see him. In London, Professor Henry Higgins, a scholar of phonetics, believes that the accent and tone of one's voice determines a person's prospects in society ("Why Can't the English?"). In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2006 it was ranked eighth in the AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals list. In 1998, the American Film Institute named it the 91st greatest American film of all time. A critical and commercial success, it became the highest-grossing film of 1964 and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The film stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle - replacing Julie Andrews from the stage musical - and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins - reprising his role from the stage musical - with Stanley Holloway, Gladys Cooper and Wilfrid Hyde-White in supporting roles. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, the film depicts a poor Cockney flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle who overhears an arrogant phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, as he casually wagers that he could teach her to speak "proper" English, thereby making her presentable in the high society of Edwardian London. In the case that you just can’t get enough of Pack Up (below) and its mixed bag of genres, check out her other 2010-delivered hit, “Skinny Genes.My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical comedy-drama film adapted from the 1956 Lerner and Loewe stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 stage play Pygmalion. I wouldn’t call Doolittle an under-achiever, that’s for sure. Her catchy, 1930’s sample reconciles perky golden oldies and modern flair. ![]() This makes for a track with the ability to transcend time and genre. Not shy of the lime light, the 22 year-old Doolittle has been performing since the age of eight and comes with a non-nonchalant ease on-camera (just peep her darling videos).ĭoolittle’s happy little jingle, “Pack Up” released with a UK boom last month and came along with her “piano bar meets theater” influence. However, the London-born cutie did spent her blossoming years focusing on Broadway, starring in RSC adaptations of Les Miserables and The Secret Garden. However, she does take on a namesake that could imply associations with both. Eliza Doolittle is not a freakishly-talented animal doctor nor is she the speech-impeded protagonist of the popular film and Broadway play, My Fair Lady.
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