Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Most Famous Case of Faking It: Pygmalion

pygmalion Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (1912) is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. 

Check out these modern film adaptations of Pygmalion:

  • Pygmalion (1938), a film adaptation by Shaw and others, starring Leslie Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza.
  • My Fair Lady (1964), a film version of the musical starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins.
  • She’s All That (1999): a modern, teenage take on Pygmalion.