By George, She’s Got It: The Heart of Audrey Hepburn, My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady at 60: The last ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood musical is so timeless because its lessons matter now more than ever

Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady by Movie Pictorial (Eiga Joho), January 1965 issue via Wikimedia Commons.

We go a lifetime without watching a story we somehow know. Finally, we saw the My Fair Lady 60th Anniversary at the theater.

And suddenly, “By George,” we’ve got it.

The whole point of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion (the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play) was that it inspired 10 films (and 10 more TV versions) between 1935 and 2021.

The story shares a universal — and insatiable — desire to turn the ordinary extraordinary, to transform a peasant into royalty:

• The latest urges. Today, we attempt such transformations, harnessing everything from prescription drugs to injections to technology, “productivity” hacks, surgery, and the dreams of AI.
• It used to be called enlightenment. In the story, set 100 years ago, the dream of transforming peasants into royalty centered more on education, fashion, manners, and communication skills.
• But the quest is foundational. All variations of this quest build on the roots of Western Culture, the notion that a slave to sin can be saved from servitude, being…