Some fans still insist the movie would’ve been better with her as the lead. Julie Andrews played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, and there was an outcry when Audrey Hepburn was cast in the movie instead. Director George Cukor had to shoot around her for a week so she could take a break and get her health back. The shoot was so physically exhausting for Hepburn that she reportedly lost eight pounds during filming. The sets get lighter on the upper floors where the servants (and Eliza) live, with painted woodwork and more feminine wallpaper: Gene Allen is considered to be the real, but uncredited, Production Designer for the film. They say that when Hepburn came down the stairs for the first time wearing Eliza’s stunning white gown for the ball, the cast and crew applauded.Īlthough Cecil Beaton is credited as the Production Designer as well as Costume Designer, he reportedly only designed the clothes and had no part in the actual designs of the sets. The woodwork is dark and masculine, which suited the character of a life-long bachelor like Higgins. The songs are literate and beloved some romantic, some comic, some nonsense, some surprisingly philosophical, every single one wonderful. My Fair Lady is the best and most unlikely of musicals, during which I cannot decide if I am happier when the characters are talking or when they are singing. The wallpaper in his townhouse was specially designed for the movie. Other locations are a little more fanciful, “suggesting” the backgrounds of the settings, such as during the Ascot Races. It was the most realistic set in the film. The Entry Hall of Higgins’ house at 27A Wimpole Street: There are two courtyards which fill the six-floor late-Georgian Grade II listed house with light in every room, and an extra 1,520 sq ft two-bedroom mews house at the end of the garden, handy for housing any Eliza Doolittle types.” Back to the movie version of Henry Higgins’ House, which was built on the Warner Bros. The property is dotted with ornate ceiling mouldings and cornices, marble flooring, and Georgian fireplaces. He was such an eminent academic in his own right that Shaw would have been well aware of him, and where he lived. The main real-life academic “model” for Higgins was a crotchety early 20th century Oxford professor of phonetics named Henry Sweet – name-checked in the preface to Pygmalion, written in 1913.īut the basis of Higgins’ grand lifestyle and home was Prof Wilson of Wimpole Street and his surroundings. You can see how it looked when it was on the market in 2016 for £14.95 million. A linguistics professor named Horace Wilson lived in a 6-story, 8,500-square-foot Georgian townhouse. The Telegraph wrote an article about the house on Wimpole Street that inspired the one in Pygmalion , the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play My Fair Lady was based on. There’s no 27A Wimpole, but there is a real 27 Wimpole Street in Marylebone. Much of the action takes place inside Henry Higgins’ townhouse, 27A Wimpole Street: There was reportedly a nearly unlimited budget allotted for the sets on this film. The DVD has special features showing how they made the movie, starting with detailed models of the sets: My Fair Lady filmed entirely on sound stages in Hollywood, including outdoor scenes. *Note: There are Amazon affiliate links in this post that may earn me commission. Let’s take a look back at beautifully designed houses in the musical, starting with Henry’s traditional townhouse on Wimpole Street. The movie, about a poor Cockney flower seller named Eliza Doolittle who hires pompous phonetics professor Henry Higgins to help her improve her speech, premiered in 1964. By the intermission I knew I was going to have to start writing a post about them as soon as I got home! What really made an impression on me while watching it on the big screen was how fabulous the sets were. Amazing how tunes like Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, I Could Have Danced All Night, and Get Me to the Church on Time stick with you. It had been years since I’d seen it, and I was surprised to realize I still remembered most of the words to the songs. I recently had the chance to see the classic Audrey Hepburn-Rex Harrison musical My Fair Lady in our local movie theater, and I fell in love with it all over again.
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