Trivia for
My Fair Lady (1964) More at IMDbPro »

• Audrey Hepburn's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon, despite Hepburn's lengthy preparation for the role.
  
  
• Jeremy Brett, who celebrated his 30th birthday during filming, was very surprised to learn that all of his singing was to be dubbed by a 42-year-old American named Bill Shirley, especially since his own singing voice at that time was remarkably good.
  
  
• James Cagney was originally offered the role of Alfred Doolittle. When he pulled out at the last minute, it went to the man who played it on Broadway, Stanley Holloway. Peter O'Toole, Cary Grant, Noel Coward, Michael Redgrave and George Sanders were all considered for the role of Higgins before Rex Harrison was finally chosen to reprise his Broadway role.
  
  
• Jack L. Warner originally didn't want Rex Harrison to reprise his stage role as Higgins for the film version, since he had seen Cleopatra (1963) and thought the actor looked too old to be believable as Audrey Hepburn's love interest. Peter O'Toole was considered for the role of Professor Higgins, but his salary demands were too high. Harrison responded in a letter to Warner that he had only looked old as Julius Caesar because he had been playing an epileptic at the end of his life, and after sending some publicity photographs of himself - minus his toupee - he was eventually cast.
  
  
• In her 2004 autobiography "Tis Herself", Maureen O'Hara claimed that Jack L. Warner asked her to dub Audrey Hepburn's singing voice in the film.
  
  
• Jack L. Warner paid $5.5 million for the film rights in February 1962. This would set a record for the amount of money paid for the film rights to any intellectual property, broken only in 1978 when Columbia paid $9.5 million for the film rights to Annie (1982)
  
  
• Rex Harrison wanted Julie Andrews for the role of Eliza, since they had played together in the Broadway version.
  
  
• Stanley Holloway originated the role of Alfie Dolittle on Broadway, but it was thought that a better known actor would be more suited for the film version.
  
  
• Because of the way Rex Harrison talked his way through the musical numbers, they were unable to prerecord them and have him lip-sync, so a wireless microphone (one of the first ever developed) was rigged up and hidden under his tie. However, this meant that his mouth and words were completely in sync and everyone else's looked off, since they were lip-syncing (when everyone is lip-syncing, it's not that noticeable). The studio thought that this was too obvious so they altered Harrison's soundtrack, lengthening and shortening notes in various places so that his synchronicity is slightly off like all the other actors.
  
  
• Gladys Cooper, who plays Mrs. Higgins (Henry Higgins' mother) in this film, played the same role in the 1963 Hallmark Hall of Fame television production "Hallmark Hall of Fame: Pygmalion (#12.3)" (1963), the play on which this film is based.
  
  
• Julie Andrews was the first choice for the role of Eliza Doolittle, but Warner Brothers, which had paid $5 million for the rights to the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical, didn't want to risk a stage actress in the central role of a $17-million film, despite lobbying from Lerner himself. However, this reason has been strongly doubted by those who believe audiences would have flocked to see the film regardless of who played the leading role. It is also reported that Jack L. Warner didn't think Andrews would be photogenic enough. He invited her to do a screen test, but she refused, so he forgot about her altogether.
  
  
• Although her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon, Audrey Hepburn's singing does actually appear in the form of the first verse of "Just You Wait, Henry Higgins". However, when the song heads into the soprano range (76 seconds in), Nixon takes over vocals. Hepburn sings the last 30 seconds of the song as well as the brief reprise. She also sings the sing-talking parts for "The Rain in Spain". Overall, as Hepburn reportedly said, about 90% of her singing was dubbed. That was far more than what she expected, as she was initially promised that most of her vocals would be used. According to Nixon, Hepburn was upset that she could not play the role vocally, and always blamed herself for that.
  
  
• According to actress Nancy Olson, who was married to lyricist Alan Jay Lerner at the time he was writing the musical, Lerner and Frederick Loewe had the most trouble writing the final song for Henry Higgins. The two writers had based the whole concept of the musical around the notion that Higgins was far too intellectual a character to emotionally sing outright, but should speak his songs on pitch, more as an expression of ideas. However, both composer and lyricist knew that Higgins would need a love song towards the end of the story when Eliza has abandoned him. This presented an obvious problem: how to write an emotional song for an emotionless character. Lerner suffered bouts of insomnia trying to write the lyrics. One night, Olson claims, she brought him a cup of tea to soothe his nerves. As she entered his study, Lerner thanked her and said "I guess I've grown accustomed to you...I've grown accustomed to your face." According to Olson, his eyes suddenly lit up, and she sat down and watched him write the entire song in one sitting, based on the idea that although Higgins couldn't "love" Eliza in the traditional sense, he would surely notice the value she represented as part of his life.
  
  
• "My Fair Lady" is the only Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe stage musical to have been filmed totally complete, with no omission of any songs from the stage version (or dialogue, for that matter). There are even some added lyrics to the song "You Did It", in which Higgins goes more into detail about the speech "expert" Zoltan Karpathy's evaluation of Eliza at the ball, that were not in the stage version. "My Fair Lady", "West Side Story", and the 1958 "South Pacific" may be the most complete film adaptations of a Broadway musical ever made.
  
  
• The title of the film appears nowhere in the dialogue nor any of the song lyrics.
  
  
• Musical theater writers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had attempted to adapt George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" as a musical long before Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, but had abandoned the project as unadaptable. Rodgers and Hammerstein felt that Shaw's style of writing intellectual dialog and the emotionless character of Henry Higgins did not lend themselves to a musical. Lerner and Lowe overcame these problems by leaving Shaw's dialogue largely intact, and working under the notion that Higgins must be played by a great actor, not a great singer. Thus, they wrote the role especially for Rex Harrison, and adopted the idea that Higgins should not sing outright, but talk on pitch, less an expression of emotions than ideas.
  
  
• When asked why he turned down the role of Henry Higgins, Cary Grant remarked that his original manner of speaking was much closer to Eliza Dolittle.
  
  
• According to one of Rex Harrison's biographers, Alexander Walker, the song "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" held special memories for the actor, as during the original Broadway run he used to sing the song to his third wife Kay Kendall, who would stand in the wings watching his performance. Harrison later admitted that when he sang the song in the film he was thinking all the time about Kendall, who had died a few years before from leukemia.
  
  
• During the parts of "Wouldn't It be Loverly" featuring Audrey Hepburn's own singing voice, her lip-syncing does not match her own singing as well as it does Marni Nixon's singing, even though Hepburn filmed the scene with her own track.
  
  
• Amusement park trams were rented to carry ballroom scene extras across the studio lot, in order to prevent their makeup and costumes from getting dirty or damaged.
  
  
• Audrey Hepburn announced the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy to the devastated cast and crew immediately after filming the number "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" on the Covent Garden set on 22 November 1963.
  
  
• 27A Wimpole Street in London (Higgins' address) does not exist (there is a 27 Wimpole Street).
  
  
• The role of Eliza Doolittle was originally played on Broadway by Julie Andrews. However, she was denied the role because the film's producers didn't think she was "known" enough as a film actress. Many felt that this snub as well as Audrey Hepburn's singing being dubbed led to Hepburn's not being nominated for the Best Actress Oscar nomination.
  
  
• Cary Grant told Jack L. Warner that not only would he not play Henry Higgins, but if Rex Harrison was not cast in the role, he wouldn't even go see the picture.
  
  
• When Eliza Dolittle demands to see what Henry Higgins has been writing about her, in the beginning of the film, he shows her his notebook, which she cannot read. The notation in the notebook is "Visible Speech", a phonetic notation invented by Alexander Melville Bell (father of Alexander Graham Bell) and extended and used heavily by Henry Sweet, a real-life phonetician and apparently the basis of the Henry Higgins character.
  
  
• Audrey Hepburn herself revealed years later that had she turned down the role of Eliza, the next actress to be offered it would not have been Julie Andrews but Elizabeth Taylor, who wanted it desperately.
  
  
• Apparently, Shirley Jones was one of the actresses to whom Jack L. Warner planned to offer the role of Eliza Dolittle if Audrey Hepburn turned it down.
  
  
• Final film of veteran actor Henry Daniell, who is unbilled as The Ambassador. He died of a heart attack on 31 October 1963, just hours after completing the dress ball sequences.
  
  
• About twenty minutes before the end of the film, Colonel Pickering offers to go off and find the missing Eliza. He exits the library set - and is never seen in the movie again!
  
  
• The 1994 restoration by Robert A. Harris used a variety of methods to return the film to its original condition. The opening credits were digitally re-created using pieces of surviving frames. A few shots were digitally restored by scanning the 65mm negative or separation masters and output back to VistaVision (and enlarged back to 65mm). Some shots were simply re-composited via separation masters. Despite this, most of the film was able to be restored directly from the camera negative. For the sound, only the six-track magnetic print master (used to add sound to 70mm prints) survived. This was digitally restored and used to create a new six-track mix (faithful to the original version), as well as new Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 mixes for modern sound systems.
  
  
• Despite intensive vocal training during pre-production, and constant practicing until her final re-recording during the post-production, Audrey Hepburn was never able to sing "Without You" properly. That song was far beyond her vocal range. However, some of her fans think that her renditions of "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" and "Show Me" were good enough to be left undubbed.
  
  
• In the scene where Eliza is practicing her "H's", she sits down in front of a spinning mirror attached to a flame. Every time she says her "H's" correctly, the flame jumps. If you look closely at the paper she is holding in her hand when it catches fire, you will see handwritten upon it the dialog that she and Professor Higgins have been saying previous to this. "Of course, you can't expect her to get it right the first time," is the first line written on the paper.
  
  
• Average Shot Length = 10 seconds
  
  
• The original choice to direct the film was Vincente Minnelli but when his salary demands were too high, the job went to George Cukor.
  
  
• Connie Stevens, then a Warners contract player, campaigned for the role of Eliza Doolittle.
  
  
• In the scene where Henry Higgins knocks a record player that is playing a recording of vowel sounds, the voice on the record is that of Dr. Peter Ladefoged, a linguist who worked as a consultant on the film.
  
  
• Joshua Logan wrote in his autobiography that he was offered the chance to direct the film, but the offer was withdrawn when he suggested that some scenes be shot on location in London.
  
  
• The play had first been staged on Broadway in March 1956, and opened in London in 1958. A clause in the contract stated that the film version could not be made until the play had finished in September 1962.
  
  
• An entire sound stage was used for doing hair and makeup for the Ascot race scene.
  
  
• The original Broadway production of "My Fair Lady" opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York on March 15, 1956, and ran for 2717 performances, which was, at the time, the longest run a Broadway show had ever had. To date (April 2009), the original production is still the eighteenth-longest-running production in Broadway history. Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway recreated their roles in the movie. Harrison won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and Hollaway was nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. The show won the 1957 Tony Award (New York City) for the Best Musical.
  
  
• Alan Jay Lerner was very annoyed by Jack L. Warner's decision to have the entire movie filmed on sound stages in Hollywood, even for outdoor scenes.
  
  
• The movie was advertised as the most eagerly anticipated production since Gone with the Wind (1939).
  
  
• There was considerable controversy over the casting of Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Dolittle. Not only did newspapers ask how a major musical could have a non-singer as its star, but in addition she was felt to be too old at 34 to play a 21-year-old.
  
  
• The American Marni Nixon had to practice a Cockney accent before she could dub all of Audrey Hepburn's singing in the movie.
  
  
• One of only 4 productions to win the Best Play Tony (1957) and the Best Picture Oscar (1964). The other 3 are The Sound of Music (1960/1965), A Man For All Seasons (1962/1966) and Amadeus (1981/1984).
  
  
• Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner had originally wanted their musical to be titled "Fanfaroon."
  
  
• U.S. television viewers had something of a Rex Harrison film-fest on Thanksgiving Week, 1973. Doctor Dolittle (1967) aired on Thanksgiving Eve on ABC-TV, followed by My Fair Lady (1964) on NBC-TV on Thanksgiving Day. This was the U.S. commercial TV premiere of both films, and was probably not a coincidence.
  
  
• Rex Harrison was very disappointed when Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza, since he felt she was badly miscast and he had hoped to work with Julie Andrews. He told an interviewer, "Eliza Doolittle is supposed to be ill at ease in European ballrooms. Bloody Audrey has never spent a day in her life out of European ballrooms." Nevertheless, Harrison was once later asked to identify his favorite leading lady. Without hesitation, he replied, "Audrey Hepburn in _My Fair Lady (1964)_."
  
  
• Audrey Hepburn later admitted she would never have accepted the role of Eliza Dolittle if she had known that producer Jack L. Warner intended to have nearly all of her singing dubbed. She also once told Julie Andrews that she should have been cast as Eliza instead of her.
  
  
• While the movie received generally favorable reviews, many critics felt that Audrey Hepburn was badly miscast in the lead role. Her attempt at Cockney received as much criticism and ridicule as Dick Van Dyke's attempt in Mary Poppins (1964).
  
  
• Although Rex Harrison was desperate to be cast as Professor Higgins, he refused to do a screen test since he felt this was beneath his dignity. He did, however, promise to Jack L. Warner that he would not simply repeat his stage performance, but would instead adapt his performance accordingly for the film.
  
  
• When Rex Harrison accepted his Academy Award for My Fair Lady (1964), he dedicated it to his "two fair ladies", Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews both who had played Eliza Doolittle with him.
  
  
• Despite extensive vocal training after landing the part of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1964), Rex Harrison was unable to sing a note. In the end the director gave up and told him to quasi-speak the whole thing as he had done in the stage version.
  
  
• It is widely believed that the film was only awarded eight Oscars because of the vast amount of money Jack L. Warner spent on advertising. The fact that an old-fashioned musical received the Best Picture Oscar in 1965 was viewed by many critics as a political act.
  
  
• There was considerable shock when Rex Harrison was given the Best Actor Oscar instead of Peter Sellers for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
  
  
• Since Audrey Hepburn was too old to play Eliza, 30-year-old Jeremy Brett was cast as 20-year-old Freddie.
  
  
• Many critics found Wilfrid Hyde-White to be rather bland as Colonel Pickering. However, this may have been intentional on the part of the producer, since he didn't want anyone to steal the show from Rex Harrison as Higgins.
  
  
• Audrey Hepburn was ashamed of her performance in the film, and was seen to visibly squirm with embarrassment at the London premiere in January 1965.
  
  
• Robert Coote was nominated for the 1962 Tony Award (New York City) for Supporting or Features Actor in a Musical for "My Fair Lady" for his role as Colonel Pickering and recreated that role in the 1976 Broadway revival.
  
  
• Stanley Holloway was nominated for the 1957 Tony Award (New York City) for Supporting or Features Actor in a Musical for "My Fair Lady" for the role of Alfred P. Doolittle and recreated the role in the movie version.
  
  
• It is widely accepted that the character of Higgins was both a closet homosexual and had Asperger's Syndrome.
  
  
• The film was to have been called "Lady Liza", but Rex Harrison refused to countenance a title based on the name of the female lead.
  
  
• During an appearance at University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008, Julie Andrews confirmed that she had been told personally by Audrey Hepburn that Andrews should have been cast in the film instead.
  
  

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