Word: eliza
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...many centuries, royal patronage was an index to British culture. Eliza beth I learned that "the Italians had the name to be the cunningest," but what Italian paintings the crown acquired were largely sold off by Cromwell though the Restoration Stuarts searched to recover them...
Regrettably, substance is frequently sacrificed to surface. Like Eliza crossing the ice floes, the compulsive witticist in Mrs. Kerr reflects a mind too busy to stop and sink. But unlike lesser jokesmiths, Jean Kerr can always be trusted to produce the wit that is instant wisdom, as in "The affair you don't get over is the one you never...
...swing to (by Andre Previn), another to sway to (by Sammy Kaye), one to weep by (Andy Williams), and one to sleep by (Percy Faith). There is also the new movie soundtrack, which has Rex Harrison in fine, fierce fettle. But Soprano Marni Nixon, dubbing in the voice of Eliza for Audrey Hepburn, sings with more finish than fire. Lovers of Broadway's fair lady, Julie Andrews, will insist on the original-cast recording, which has sold 5,000,000 copies...
...film's richest asset may well be Rex Harrison, making capital of the closeup in his 1,007th performance as irascible Professor Henry Higgins, who masterminds the metamorphosis of the cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. Harrison still talks his songs and sings his dialogue in a triumph of stylized, polished acting that would be memorable with or without music. Another holdover from Broadway is Stanley Holloway, raffishly repeating his role as Eliza's father, a dustman-turned-moralist who speaks some of Shaw's most corrosively funny lines-wisely preserved intact-then stops the show with...
...burning question mark of this sumptuous adaptation is Audrey Hepburn's casting as Eliza, the role that Julie Andrews had clearly been born to play. Purists may cavil that Hepburn's singing voice, most of it dubbed by Soprano Marni Nixon, sounds too much like Julie and not enough like Audrey. But after a slow start, when the practiced proficiency of her cockney dialect suggests that Actress Hepburn is really only slumming, she warms her way into a graceful, glamorous performance, the best of her career...