![]() Furthermore, Audrey always looked younger than she actually was. The life of an apparently quite poor flower girl in those days probably would have aged the character of Eliza beyond her years in this case, Dawson Casting may have been justified. ![]() Audrey Hepburn was in her mid-thirties when she played the 21-year-old Eliza in the film adaptation.Creator Backlash: Audrey Hepburn felt miscast as Eliza Doolittle and felt that Julie Andrews should have got it.CBS licensed the film to 20th Century Fox throughout the 1980's and 90's, and rights are currently held by Paramount due to their ownership of CBS. ![]() Channel Hop: The film was produced by Warner Bros., but their contract with CBS, who backed the Broadway show, stipulated that the rights would revert to them eight years later in 1972.This is very obviously a studio-bound film, as was common back in the days before New Hollywood. California Doubling: Set in London, but filmed entirely at Warner Brothers Burbank Studios.The title didn't officially become My Fair Lady until the second week of rehearsals. Working Title: Liza, Lady Liza, My Lady Liza, Fanfaroon note An old-fashioned term meaning "braggart," presumably referring to Higgins.Even after Lerner and Lowe took on the project instead, Mary Martin was still the first choice for the role of Eliza, but she turned it down. What Could Have Been: The concept of a Pygmalion musical was first proposed by producer Cheryl Crawford, as a vehicle for Mary Martin with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein.(The original ending of the number was restored for the cast recording.) Wag the Director: The reason Higgins interrupts "Without You" before it can finish is that Rex Harrison felt Higgins would not stand silently and let Eliza sing to him without interruption in one tryout performance he actually walked offstage during the number to prove his point.Recursive Adaptation: My Fair Lady is based as much on the 1938 film version of Pygmalion as the original stage version, making it a case of stage -> screen -> stage.During rehearsals, director Moss Hart dismissed the rest of the cast for two days and coached her, word by word, through the dialogue, telling her how to deliver every line and essentially acting as the real-life Higgins to her Eliza. Life Imitates Art: When she was cast in the demanding role of Eliza, Julie Andrews was only twenty and had never acted in anything more complex than The Boy Friend.A ballet where the servants help Eliza prepare for the ball was also cut during tryouts to keep the show's running time down.During tryouts, Higgins tried to cheer Eliza up with a Pep-Talk Song called "Come to the Ball." The song was cut due to the show's excessive length, though a portion of it remains in the patter section of "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" - making it a Dark Reprise of a song that isn't actually in the show.There's an extra verse sometimes re-added to "You Did It" expanding on Karpathy's raves about Eliza's certain Hungarian birth."Say A Prayer For Me Tonight" was written for this show, but cut and used later in Gigi.So the rhyme works - but only if it's said by a Brit and heard by an American. ![]() However, most Americans make no such distinction (except for the traditional Boston accent): for them, "father" and "bother" are a perfect rhyming pair! note This conflation, known as the "father-bother merger", is one of the distinguishing features of North American English. The rhyme still fails in British English, because of the subtle distinction that Brits (and, indeed, most English speakers) make between the short "o" of "bother" and the long "a" of "father". Fortunately, Freddy is singing the Queen's English, in which "rather" rhymes with "father". The rhyme would completely fail in American English, where "rather" rhymes with "gather".
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