My Fair Lady/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: This version has pretty much overshadowed the original stage play.
  • Adorkable: Freddy. Clumsy, sweet, and very loving. And a bit creepy.
  • Ambiguously Gay: Two guys living together who spend their days dressing up Audrey Hepburn.
  • Award Snub: The film won plenty of awards, but Audrey Hepburn wasn't even nominated at the Acadamy Awards for Best Actress. To make it juicier, the award instead went to Julie Andrews, who had played Eliza on Broadway and was denied the role in the film because she wasn't a big enough name... even though she had the singing talent Hepburn didn't have (See Non-Singing Voice, below). Whew!
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Eliza and Henry, to Shaw's consternation.
  • Memetic Mutation: "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."
  • Values Dissonance: So Eliza either gets together with a relentless stalker or a misogynistic jerk...does either end count as a "happy ending"?
    • That and the fact that the whole thing seems to be The Stepford Wives, only the horrifying Uncanny Valley changes to her are treated like it's a good thing.
    • You have to realize that Eliza really isn't much better than Higgins herself. She approached Henry Higgins. She knew the consequences that he told her, and should have thought of the others herself. And besides, Higgins might have been jerk and a misogynist, but he's at least self aware of the former, and seems to become aware of the latter by the end. He's also totally honest: at no point in the movie does he either lie to Eliza at all nor does he even say anything with the deliberate intention to hurt her. Eliza is the one who acts intentionally antagonistic, and the whole thing was her choice in the first place.
    • Here's the facts: she didn't get together with Higgins. George Bernard Shaw made it quite plain in his postscript to Pygmalion that Eliza left Higgins - whom Shaw implied was gay anyway (and you can see plenty of hints dropped in Pygmalion which remain in the film: love of men, being overly attached to his mother, and so on -- In fact, it is more or less perfectly clear that Shaw would have made this fanon into text if it wasn't for the fact that a positive portrayal of a homosexuals was forbidden at the time) - and married Freddie. Shaw was a modern feminist at the turn of the century which was akin to almost being a pervert who favored things like women's suffrage, but the leads of the play kept having Higgins and Eliza return to each other - this is probably the standout example of the Fan-Preferred Couple.