My Fair Lady Essay

My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The origins of Pygmalion are found in Greek mythology. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who was not interested in women. However, he felt in love with Galatea, his masterpiece, a beautiful statue of a woman out of ivory. He prayed so long and constantly to Aphrodita that the Goddess finally brought the statue alive. Afterwards the couple got married and they lived together a ‘happy ending’.
In 1913, the Irish playwright adapted the Greek myth to modern-day England and based it on a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, who makes a bet that he can train a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, in order to pass her for a duchess at

The film starts in the outside of an the Royal Opera House of London in Covent Garden. Professor Higgins (Rex Harrisson) boasts to Colonel Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) himself an expert in phonetics, that he could teach any woman to speak so properly that she could pass off as a duchess at an embassy ball. Higgins uses the example of a flower seller, Eliza (Audrey Hepburn), that is seated on a column of the Opera House, whose thick Cockney accent makes her unsuitable to own a flower shop. The next day, she visits Higgins’ house and asks him to teach her to speak as a lady in order to run her own business. Pickering considers it interesting and offers to pay for her elocution

Doolittle (Stanley Halloway), a dustman, appears as the protector father when in reality he only want to extract some money to Higgins and he ‘sells’ his daughter for £5. Higgins is so impressed by the man’s lack of moral and his natural gift for language (he is very eloquent) that he recommends him to a wealthy and tiresome American who is interested in morality. Meanwhile, professor Higgins is very exigent with Eliza, degrading her and not showing any empathy for her. As she does not seem to improve, all of them are about to surrender but fortunately, at that moment she starts to speak with an impeccable upper class accent.
Professor Higgins wants to test her in the Ascot Racecourse. Although she makes a good impression, she shocks everyone by a sudden and vulgar lapse into Cockney while encouraging a horse to win the race. Nevertheless, after this incident, she is still able to attend the embassy ball as a mysterious lady, and indeed she dances with a foreign prince. Moreover, she has been able to convince Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), a Hungarian phonetics expert trained by Higgins, that she is not only Hungarian but of royal