Musical Matinees (The Masters): My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady was at once a critical and commercial success! It became the second highest-grossing film of 1964 and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The American Film Institute included the film as #91 in its 1998 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, as #12 in its 2002 AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions, and as #8 in its 2006 AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Quite a ride for a film about a pompous phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) who is so sure of his abilities that he takes it upon himself to transform a Cockney working-class girl into someone who can pass for a cultured member of high society. His subject is Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), who agrees to speech lessons to improve her job prospects. Higgins and Eliza clash, then form an unlikely bond -- one that is threatened by an aristocratic suitor (Jeremy Brett). My Fair Lady was adapted from the 1956 Lerner and Loewe stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 stage play Pygmalion.

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