One of the best-known items in the history of movie trivia is that Hepburn did not sing her own songs, but was dubbed by the gifted Marni Nixon. So notorious became this dubbing, so egregious was it made to appear, that although "My Fair Lady" was nominated for 12 Oscars and won eight (including best picture, actor, director and cinematography), Hepburn was not even nominated for best actress; Julie Andrews was, the same year, for "Mary Poppins," and she won.
At this remove, can we step back and take a fresh look at the controversy? True, Hepburn did not sing her own songs (although she performed some of the intros and outros), and there was endless comment on moments when the lip-syncing was not perfect. But the dubbing of singing voices was commonplace at the time, and Nixon herself also dubbed Deborah Kerr ("The King and I") and Natalie Wood ("West Side Story"). Even actors who did their own singing were lip-syncing to their own pre-recorded dubs (and an occasional uncredited assist). I learn from Robert Harris, who restored "My Fair Lady" in 1993, that this was apparently the first musical to use any form of live recording of the music, although "only of Mr. Harrison, who refused to mouth to playbacks. His early model wireless microphone can be seen as a rather inflated tie during his musical numbers." Harrison's lips are therefore always in perfect sync, as opposed to everyone else in this film and all previous musicals.
That Hepburn did not do her own singing obscures her triumph, which is that she did her own acting. "My Fair Lady," with its dialogue drawn from Shaw, was trickier and more challenging than most other stage musicals; the dialogue not only incorporated Shavian theory, wit and ideology, but required Eliza to master a transition from Cockney to the Queen's English. All of this Hepburn does flawlessly and with heedless confidence, in a performance that contains great passion. Consider the scenes where she finally explodes at Higgins' misogynist disregard, returns to the streets of Covent Garden, and finds she fits in nowhere. "I sold flowers," she tells Henry late in their crisis. "I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else."
It is typical of Shaw, admirable of Lerner and Loewe, and remarkable of Hollywood, that the film stays true to the original material, and Higgins doesn't cave in during a soppy rewritten "happy ending." Astonished that the ungrateful Eliza has stalked out of his home, Higgins asks in a song, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" He tracks her to her mother's house, where the aristocratic Mrs. Higgins (Gladys Cooper) orders him to behave himself. "What?" he asks his mother. "Do you mean to say that I'm to put on my Sunday manners for this thing that I created out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden?" Yes, she does. Higgins realizes he loves Eliza, but even in the play's famous last line he perseveres as a defiant bachelor: "Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?" It remains an open question for me, at the final curtain, whether Eliza stays to listen to what he says next.
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