The Backstage Drama of MY FAIR LADY (100 Years of Warner Brothers Blogathon)

It was one of the biggest, if not the biggest movie of 1964, but My Fair Lady was plagued with backstage drama 

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Before we begin, this post is a part of the 100 Years of Warner Brothers Blogathon hosted by The Metzinger Sisters at Silver Scenes Blog. Click through to read all of the posts over the weekend!

My Fair Lady is, by all means, a tentpole in Audrey Hepburn’s career. She’d come out of the gate with Roman Holiday in 1953—winning an Oscar in her first major English-language movie—then kept up with strong performances in films like Sabrina, The Nun’s Story, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

She’d done only one musical before this, 1957’s Funny Face opposite Fred Astaire. Her singing hadn’t been dubbed, but by 1964, the producers of My Fair Lady were adamant that Audrey wouldn’t be singing as Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flowerseller who gets elocution lessons from Henry Higgins.

They just didn’t alert her to this fact until filming had already started and she’d already recorded her songs. In fact, they’d propped her up and told her that she would be singing, and they’d no doubt her voice would sound fantastic in the end. They gave her singing lessons and a vocal coach… and all the while there was a clause in her contract that permitted them to dub over her voice.

According to Donald Spoto’s biography of Audrey, Enchantment, Warner Bros. engaged Marni Nixon as Audrey’s singing voice in May 1963 and by the time filming had begun in August, she was re-recording the songs Audrey had already sung.

Audrey was filming and lip-synching to the songs she’d sung already, and was still in the dark that her voice would ultimately be replaced by Marni Nixon (you’ll recognize her voice in The King and I, West Side Story, and she finally gets to show her face on screen as a nun in The Sound of Music).

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It was an accident that she found out when she did, and Audrey experienced real heartbreak knowing that her vocals wouldn’t be heard. You can still hear her singing on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ and ‘Just You Wait’ and her voice does seem to be more suited for the cockney accent, but… it’s just not at Julie’s or Marni’s level. And that’s not a bad thing! Audrey’s still great in the role, giving her all to her performance of Eliza.

But although she had the star power and the name recognition, her casting as Eliza was controversial in and of itself because of the magnetism of the young British actress who’d originated the role on Broadway and in the West End: Julie Andrews.

‘My Fair Lady’ debuted at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway on March 15, 1956. It starred Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins, and it was, in short, a smash. It won many Tonys, had a run on the West End with its original leads, and played until September 1962.

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Of course Hollywood wanted to adapt it, and Jack Warner at Warner Bros. was the man to do it. He just wanted an actress with established star power in the role of Eliza, not the woman who brought her to life on Broadway.

By October 1962, Audrey was attached to the role of Eliza Doolittle, commanding a salary of $1 million. The public outrage was swift: Julie Andrews was Eliza Doolittle, and Rex Harrison and Stanely Holloway were both reprising their stage roles, why not her?

In 2022, ahead of receiving the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Julie Andrews gave an interview to Vanity Fair where she discussed the furore surrounding My Fair Lady.

She shared, once again, how she’d never expected to be offered the role but had hoped it might happen. “But suddenly there was Disney in the wings. And that happened instead. I've been incredibly fortunate then—and really all my life—at miraculous turns of good fortune across my path.”

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Despite what many considered a strong performance, the fact that Audrey’s vocals were dubbed meant that she wasn’t a strong contender for the awards that season.

But in a quirk of fate, not being available for My Fair Lady left Julie Andrews open for the Disney classic Mary Poppins, which garnered her the Oscar and the Golden Globe, among other prizes.

Audrey would go on to be snubbed during awards season in 1964: Julie Andrews won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Mary Poppins, and she managed to sneak in an epic comeback to the man who paved the way for her victory on Globes night: “My thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner.”

The two ladies met on Oscar night in 1965, and Audrey confided in her: “Julie, you should have done it, but I didn’t have the guts to turn it down.”

In an interview decades later, Julie said that this moment cemented their friendship.

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Audrey was pragmatic about her awards chances, and wrote to My Fair Lady’s director, George Cukor, after her ‘snub’: “I think I am the only one who is not in the dark. Everybody seems to search for an explanation. It seems to me it is all very simple—my performance was not up to snuff… Because My Fair Lady meant so terribly much to me, I had sort of secretly hoped for a nomination but never counted on the Oscar. Therefore, disappointed I is, but not astounded like my chums seem to be. What does amaze me is the hullabaloo which ensued and the constant pressure…to get me to come to California on the big night.”

She would make it out to California, as you’ve previously read. And she presented Rex Harrison with his Oscar, standing by his side throughout his entire speech. He would take care to thank both of his leading ladies: Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn.