My Fair Lady - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[leo]

The 1994 restoration by Robert A. Harris used a variety of methods to return the film to its original condition. The opening credits were digitally re-created using pieces of surviving frames. A few shots were digitally restored by scanning the 65mm negative or separation masters and output back to VistaVision (and enlarged back to 65mm). Some shots were simply re-composited via separation masters. Despite this, most of the film was able to be restored directly from the camera negative. For the sound, only the six-track magnetic print master (used to add sound to 70mm prints) survived. This was digitally restored and used to create a new six-track mix (faithful to the original version), as well as new Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 mixes for modern sound systems.

[maureen]

Costume Designer Cecil Beaton reputedly created one thousand five hundred costumes for this movie.

[manuel]

Alan Jay Lerner was very annoyed by Producer Jack L. Warner's decision to have the entire movie filmed on soundstages in Hollywood, even for outdoor scenes.

[sophie]

An entire soundstage was used for doing hair and make-up for the Ascot race scene.

[lynn]

Racehorses race around English tracks in a clockwise direction and would have been running past Eliza and her startled Ascot acquaintances heading the opposite way. Incorrect, English racecourses go clockwise and counter-clockwise. They happen to go clockwise at Ascot, so I'll give you that. The movie still has it wrong.

[cameron]

Favorite movie of Rosalind Chao and Kim Basinger.

[lynn]

The original choice to direct this movie was Vincente Minnelli, but when his salary demands were too high, the job went to George Cukor.

[miriam]

Cary Grant told Producer Jack L. Warner that not only would he not play Professor Henry Higgins, but if Sir Rex Harrison was not cast in the role, he wouldn't even go see the movie. The same Hollywood legend is told about The Music Man (1962), that Cary Grant was offered the role of Harold Hill and told the producer that if Robert Preston wasn't cast he wouldn't even go see the movie.

[terry]

When Eliza Doolittle demands to see what Professor Henry Higgins has been writing about her, in the beginning of the movie, he shows her his notebook, which she cannot read. The notation in the notebook is "Visible Speech", a phonetic notation invented by Alexander Melville Bell (father of Alexander Graham Bell) and extended and used heavily by Henry Sweet, a real-life phonetician and apparently the basis of the Professor Henry Higgins character.