37th Academy Awards · 1965
My Fair Lady
Directed byCooked up by George Cukor
“The loverliest motion picture of them all!”
“The rain in Spain? Eliza's glow up was mainly insane ✨”
The storyThe lore 📖
A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.
Professor Henry Higgins is a snobby language nerd who bets he can turn Eliza Doolittle, a flower seller with a strong Cockney accent, into someone who can pass as a duchess 🌸. Cue intense speech lessons and catchy songs. Eliza has a total glow up, but she also realizes Higgins is giving the ick by treating her like a project. She demands respect, periodt.
What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾
Tomatometer
94%
Fresh
#30 of 98 winnersFamous linesLines living rent free
Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin' arse!
Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?
The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.
Col. Pickering: Have you no morals, man?
Alfred P. Doolittle: Nah, can't afford 'em. Neither could you, if you were as poor as me.
Them 'as pinched it, done her in!
I sold flowers; I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else.
She's so deliciously low, so horribly dirty!
All I want is 'Enry 'Iggins' 'ead.
I find the moment that a woman makes friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance.
Not her, gin was mother's milk to her.
Quotes via Wikiquote
Filming locationsWhere they shot it 📍
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Warner Bros. Studios Burbank
Burbank, California
The entire film was shot on six of the studio's stages from August to December 1963.
Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓
- Julie Andrews, Broadway's Eliza, was replaced by Audrey Hepburn because Andrews had never been in a film; Alan Jay Lerner told her, 'I so wanted you to do it, Julie, but they wanted a name.'Wikipedia · Production
- Rex Harrison refused to lip-sync, so he sang live with a wireless microphone hidden in the knot of his necktie, the first such use while filming a motion picture.Wikipedia · Dubbing
- Despite the New York Times announcing that Audrey Hepburn would do her own singing, she was dubbed by Marni Nixon on nearly every song; Hepburn's own voice survives mainly in parts of 'Just You Wait.'Wikipedia · Dubbing
- Defending the use of dubbing, Jack L. Warner remarked that it had been commonplace for years: 'We even dubbed Rin Tin Tin.'Wikipedia · Dubbing
- Warner Bros. paid a then-unprecedented $5.5 million for the film rights, plus 47.25% of the gross over $20 million.Wikipedia · Production
- With a $17 million budget, My Fair Lady was the most expensive film shot in the United States up to that time, and it was filmed entirely on Warner Bros. soundstages in Burbank.Wikipedia · Production
- Rex Harrison hated some lyrics in 'You Did It' and refused to sing them, until George Cukor threatened to leave the production unless they were restored for the film.Wikipedia · Order of musical numbers
- At the 1994 restoration premiere, Marni Nixon herself introduced a version of 'Wouldn't It Be Loverly' sung by Audrey Hepburn, reconstructed from outtakes.Wikipedia · Later releases
- CBS chief William S. Paley added a clause that ownership of the film negative would revert to CBS seven years after release, and the rights did revert after the 1971 re-release.Wikipedia · Production
- Audrey Hepburn was 34 during filming but played 21-year-old Eliza, and The Washington Post called her 'recognizably exquisite—but not 21.'Wikipedia · Production