My Fair Lady (film) My Fair Lady (film) My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical film adapted from the Lerner and Loewe eponymous stage musical based on the 1913 stage play "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw. 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. The film stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as
My Fair Lady Tony Llewellyn-Jones as Colonel Pickering, Deidre Rubenstein as Mrs. Pearce, and David Whitney as Karpathy (later Glen Hogstrom). According to Geoffrey Block, "Opening night critics immediately recognized that "My Fair Lady" fully measured up to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of an integrated musical...Robert Coleman...wrote 'The Lerner-Loewe songs are not only delightful, they advance the action as well. They are ever so much more than interpolations, or interruptions.'" The musical opened to "unanimously glowing reviews, one of which said 'Don't bother reading this review now. You'd better sit right down and send for those tickets...' Critics praised the thoughtful use