My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady is a 1956 Broadway musical starring Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins. In 1964, it was adapted to film, with Harrison reprising his role as Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. The musical was based on Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion. It's a sort of Cinderella story, with two life-long bachelors (Professor Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering) making a bet that Professor Higgins can't teach Eliza to pass as an upper class lady.

Songs

• I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, and still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things I've never done before.
  • Eliza Doolittle, "I Could Have Danced All Night"

• Women are irrational, that's all there is to that! Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags! They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!
  • Professor Henry Higgins, "A Hymn to Him"

• Damn, damn, damn, DAMN! ... I've grown accustomed to her face!
  • Professor Henry Higgins, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"

• Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in.
  • Professor Henry Higgins, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"

• Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!
  • Professor Henry Higgins, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"

• There even are places where English completely disappears! In America, they haven't used it for years!
  • Professor Henry Higgins, "Why Can't the English?"

• I have often walked down this street before; But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. All at once am I Several stories high, Knowing I'm on the street where you live.
  • Freddy Einsford-Hill, "On the Street Where You Live"

• Art and music will thrive without you. Somehow Keats will survive without you. And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain, even that will remain without you. I can do without you!
  • Eliza Doolittle, "Without You"

• All I want is a room somewhere, Far away from the cold night air. With one enormous chair, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?
  • Eliza Doolittle, "Wouldn't it be Loverly?"

Eliza Doolittle

(times in parentheses from Warner Brother's 1964 film)

• Them 'as pinched it, done her in! (1:29:17)

• Them she lived with would have done her in for a hatpin let alone a hat.

• Not her, gin was mother's milk to her.

• Here, what are you sniggering at? (1:30:08)

• Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin' arse! (1:31:18)

• to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb. I'm a respectable girl: so help me, I never spoke to him 'cept so far as to buy a flower off me.

• The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.

• I sold flowers; I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else.

• You dear friend who talks so well, you can go to Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire!

• All I want is 'Enry 'Iggins' 'ead.

Professor Henry Higgins

• She's so deliciously low, so horribly dirty!

• Eliza, you are to stay here for the next six months learning to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist's shop. At the end of six months you will be taken to an embassy ball in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the king finds out you are not a lady, you will be taken to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls! If you are not found out, you shall be given a present of... uh... seven and six to start life within a lady's shop. If you refuse this offer, you will be the most ungrateful, wicked girl, and the angels will weep for you.

• I find the moment that a woman makes friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance. And I find the moment that I make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. So here I am – a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.

• It's about filling up the deepest cut that separates class from class and soul from soul.

• Damn Mrs Pearce, damn the coffee, and damn you! And damn my own folly for having lavished my hard-earned knowledge, and the treasure of my regard and intimacy, on a heartless guttersnipe!

• If the Higgins oxygen burns up her little lungs, let her seek some stuffiness that suits her! She's an owl sickened by a few days of my sunshine! Very well, let her go - I can do without her. I can do without anyone! I have my own soul, my own spark of divine fire!

• Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?

Dialogue

Col. Pickering: Have you no morals, man?

Alfred P. Doolittle: Nah, can't afford 'em. Neither could you, if you were as poor as me.

---

Higgins's mother: Why Henry, you're not even dressed properly!

Prof. Higgins: Oh, I changed my shirt.

External links

• My Fair Lady quotes at the Internet Movie Database
• My Fair Lady at Mojo
• My Fair Lady at Rotten TomatoesHiggins, a master linguist, cannot turn a ragged girl with a harsh cockney accent into a well-spoken young woman who can fool others into believing she is a member of the