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MY FAIR LADY

I woke up this morning, and there was nothing of any urgency or attraction on television.  

  • News channels had the full Merrick Garland hearing for Attorney General.  He will be confirmed.  Hardly worth watching. 
  • Looks like the Supreme Court did Donald Trump a favor by not announcing their verdict that he would need to provide his tax returns to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., until today.  Trump's niece has already provided some details, but not everything. 
  • No worthy sports program.  
  • No tsunami heading for Hawaii, making local stations repeat old news.

I noticed My Fair Lady on TCM had around half an hour left.  I have NEVER just seen the end of any of my favorite films.  But, with nothing else of interest, I did.  This was the restored 50th Anniversary version.  Can you believe that this flick was released in 1964, 57 years ago?  Rotten Tomatoes bestowed 95/90 ratings.

When the author of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw passed away in 1950, Gabriel Pascal asked Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II to develop a musical adaptation.  They tried, and failed.  So Pascal went to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lower in 1952.  They couldn't.  But when Pascal died in 1954, Lerner and Lowe went back one more time, and succeeded.

Audrey Hepburn was already maybe my favorite actress, and I reflected on her Breakfast at Tiffany's (RT: 89/91) in 1961.  She actually did the singing of Moon River.  

Marni Nixon, of course, was the voice in My Fair Lady, as she was for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story.  Some other interesting facets of Nixon's career:

  • The studio kept a secret about this dubbing from Natalie Wood until after the production.
  • Deborah Kerr admired this voice so much that she was called back to do her singing for the 1957 An Affair to Remember.
  • Remembering that Audrey Hepburn replaced Julie Andrews (who was the Broadway star for My Fair Lady), there must have been a revenge link here, but Nixon appeared as one of the nuns in the 1965 Sound of Music, (RT: 83/91), singing Maria.

A few other bits of info about Audrey Hepburn:

  • She was born in Brussels Belgium, and her mother was a baroness.
  • Her parents were Nazi sympathizers, and her father abandoned the family.
  • Is a member of the EGOT club:  winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
  • Spoke English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Italian.
  • She was an introvert, most happy just staying in her apartment all weekend alone.
  • Enjoyed gardening, and has a tulip named for her.
  • Her first film hit was with Gregory Peck in the 1953 Roman Holiday (RT: 97/93).  I recorded this film a couple of months ago, and tonight will see it.  Would have loved to have watched a sequel where they got together twenty years later.  But never made.
  • After she retired, she became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and traveled the world on their behalf, one of them being a vaccination campaign to immunize the whole country of Turkey.  She would have  been valuable today.
  • She passed away in 1993 soon after one of her missions.

Audrey Hepburn's films bring back so many memories.  About My Fair Lady, the final scene was a surprise.  I don't remember that ending.  What was it?  You got to watch it someday, or click on that link.

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