My Fair Lady

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the premiere of My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn as an ambitious Cockney florist. One of the greatest classics and one of the greatest Hollywood musicals, it is staged with panache and acted with bravado – not only by Hepburn, but also by Stanley Holloway as Eliza’s irresponsible father and Rex Harrison in the role of the pompous scholar of phonetics. The film is full of subtleties that only a skilled director of women like George Cukor could have brought to the myth of Pygmalion. While My Fair Lady is conservative, it also bends the rules of the masculine world that surrounds Eliza Doolittle. Casting Hepburn as Eliza, although controversial, imparted the film with not only grace, but also further layers of meaning that can be enjoyed, even today, to the rhythm of wonderful musical numbers.

Patrycja Mucha

George Cukor (1899–1981) was an American director who specialized in comedies and literary adaptations. He had a reputation as a “women’s director”, although personally he resented the term. Nonetheless, it was probably no accident that he directed the first Hollywood film with an all-female cast, The Women (1939). His other films include Dinner at Eight (1933), Gaslight (1944) and Adam’s Rib (1949).

4K restoration.