My Fair Lady: stage vs screen

George Cukor's 1964 film of My Fair Lady stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, and it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the screenplay from the 1956 Broadway musical, with music by Frederick Loewe, based on Shaw's Pygmalion. It follows the show closely but not exactly. These are the main changes.

Stage

Broadway musical (1956)

Screen

My Fair Lady (1964), directed by George Cukor

1. Audrey Hepburn replaces Julie Andrews

Julie Andrews originated Eliza on Broadway in 1956 and in London in 1958, but studio head Jack L. Warner cast Hepburn instead. Lerner told Andrews the studio wanted a name. Andrews went on to make Mary Poppins in 1964 and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it. Hepburn was 34 when she played the 21-year-old Eliza.

2. Marni Nixon sings for Eliza

Marni Nixon sang most of Eliza's songs for Hepburn. Hepburn's own voice survives in the harsher sections of "Just You Wait" and its brief reprise, and some of her original recordings were released in the 1990s. Jeremy Brett, who played Freddy, was dubbed by Bill Shirley. Rex Harrison sang live on set with a wireless microphone hidden in his tie, because he never delivered his speak-sung numbers the same way twice.

3. Some of the stage cast returns, some do not

Harrison repeated his stage role as Higgins and Stanley Holloway repeated Alfred Doolittle, and Holloway was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Others were recast: Wilfrid Hyde-White plays Pickering, Gladys Cooper (also Oscar-nominated) plays Mrs. Higgins, Jeremy Brett plays Freddy, and Theodore Bikel plays Zoltan Karpathy.

4. The intermission moves

On stage, Act One ends after the Embassy Ball. In the film, the intermission comes earlier, just before the ball, as the characters leave for the embassy. That puts the ball, with Eliza's triumph and Karpathy's declaration that she is a Hungarian princess, early in the second half instead of at the end of the first.

5. The busker overture is dropped

The stage show opens with an instrumental "Busker Sequence" in Covent Garden, which the film omits. A few of its measures can still be heard as Eliza walks through the rain. The film also uses the original verse of Eliza's "Show Me," and the rest of the song order follows the stage show closely, from "Why Can't the English?" to "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."

6. "With a Little Bit of Luck" moves

On stage, Alfred Doolittle's "With a Little Bit of Luck" is the third song, before Higgins's "I'm an Ordinary Man," and it returns later in Act One as a separate reprise. In the film it comes fourth, after "An Ordinary Man," and it is sung in one scene with no separate reprise. A verse of the song was also cut to save time.

7. A fight over "You Did It"

"You Did It" is the song in which Higgins and Pickering celebrate Eliza's success at the ball while ignoring her part in it. Rex Harrison disliked some of its lyrics and refused to sing them for the film. Cukor threatened to leave the production unless they were included, and Harrison gave in, so the lyrics are in the finished movie.

8. Shot on studio sets, not in London

Cukor filmed the movie entirely at Warner Bros. in Burbank, from August to December 1963, on six sound stages, and Lerner later said he disliked the studio-bound result. Cecil Beaton designed the costumes, winning that Oscar, and shared the Oscar for art direction. The $17 million budget made it the most expensive American film shot up to that time.

My Fair Lady movie vs musical: FAQs