Word: eliza
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...putting in an 'aye' that his whole line came out meaning only, "I wish I were English!" And voices invariably slipped into Cambridgeese after an arduous cockney spurt. Why didn't Hurley pick something original and indigenous? Then his cast could have projected emotions instead of taking an Eliza Doolittle lesson in reverse...
...Stolen Time." Clowning as a flapper was one thing. Carrying the difficult role of Eliza in My Fair Lady demanded a depth that Julie had to struggle to reach. It was almost a year after Boy Friend opened that she was offered the part in Fair Lady-and she nearly threw it away, so intimidated was she by the awful challenge of the trinity of Rex Harrison, Director Moss Hart and George Bernard Shaw. When she failed to get a fix on the mercurial part of the cockney flower girl, Director Hart put Julie through what he called 48 hours...
...company-brewing up high tea every afternoon, expertly picking every pocket in the cast, bounding into her old music-hall routines. Everyone but Harrison was amused, but in the New York premiere he, too, came to appreciate Julie. As the stage manager recalls it, during the first act when Eliza, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering fall back on the couch together after The Rain in Spain, Harrison suddenly dried up. He couldn't remember his next line, and the audience held its breath-until Julie grabbed hands and pulled them back to their feet. "Let's take...
...worse disappointment was the news from Hollywood. Jack Warner, who had paid $5,500,000 for the film rights to My Fair Lady, did not want Julie for Eliza; it was the simplest sort of Hollywood economics: by Hollywood calculations, she was not an important enough marquee name to risk in a major film. Audrey Hepburn got the part, but though her performance was admirable, her cockney character lacked the wondrous snippety snarl that Julie had given the role; Eliza's singing, moreover, was largely a product of outside dubbing, and short of Julie's performance at that...
...time taxi driver. General Bounine (Michael Kermoyan) is one of those loyal servants of the Czar of All the Russias, without whom the czardom could scarcely have fallen. Bounine does not believe that the girl escaped the Bolshevik firing squad at Ekaterinburg, but he plays Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle and coaches her to bluff big. After all, ?400,000 is waiting in the Bank of England for the rightful Romanov heir. Some blind Russian peasants who happen to be milling around the streets of Berlin oblige by blubbering "Little Mother" all over the set, and it is clear...