pygmalion bernard shaw george bernard shaw

But one of the guests - young Freddy Eynsford-Hill - is fascinated by her.

There, though speaking in a well-bred accent, Eliza scandalizes those present with her vulgar, slang-filled conversation and profanity. Amused by Dolittle's roguish attitude, Higgins offers him £10, but Doolittle will only accept £5, explaining that as one of the 'undeserving poor' he only wants enough for a drunken weekend.Īfter a rigorous internship, Eliza is sent as an experiment to an at-home gathering held by Mrs Higgins, the professor's mother. Eliza is then taken upstairs to have a bath by Mrs Pearce, the housekeeper, and while this is taking place, Eliza's father, the dustman Alfred Doolittle, arrives to demand compensation for the loss of his daughter. Colonel Pickering makes a bet with him, offering to pay all the expenses if the professor manages to fulfil his boast. Next morning, Eliza arrives at Higgins' house to ask for elocution lessons.

Higgins argues that by teaching Eliza to speak correctly by his methods, she could have a better future and would even be able to pass as a duchess. As the incident is being cleared up, Higgins talks to Colonel Pickering, a fellow scholar of languages and dialects, who has come from India in order to meet him. While transcribing the conversation of passers-by one evening, linguist Professor Higgins is mistaken for a policeman, causing protests from the Covent Garden flower seller Eliza Doolittle and various bystanders. He and his fellow writers also managed to retain the controversial line 'Not bloody likely!' from the play's text, making Hiller possibly the first person to utter that swear word in a British film and giving rise to adverts for the film reading 'Miss Pygmalion? Not ****** likely!'. A long ballroom sequence was added, introducing an entirely new character, Count Aristid Karpathy (seen both here and in the musical My Fair Lady, named as Professor Zoltan Karpathy – mentioned in the final scene of the original play, but with no name or onstage appearance), written wholly by Shaw. Ian Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald and Kay Walsh also made uncredited contributions to the screenplay. Lipscomb removed exposition unnecessary outside a theatrical context and added new scenes and dialogue by Shaw. The resulting Pygmalion scenario by Cecil Lewis and W.P. Shaw was reluctant to allow a film adaptation of Pygmalion owing to the low quality of previous film adaptations of his works, but Pascal managed to convince him (on the condition Shaw retained constant personal supervision of the adaptation) and later went on to adapt Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.

The Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal wished to create a set of films based on Shaw's works, beginning with Pygmalion, and went to see Shaw in person to gain permission to do so. Scott Sunderland, Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion

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