My Fair Lady (film) in the context of "Edwardian"

Pygmalion is a play written by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1912, named after the Greek mythological figure. It was first presented onstage in German translation, premiering at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913. Its English-language premiere took place at His Majesty's Theatre in London's West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle.

Pygmalion became the playwright's most popular play, enduring in popular culture as the heavily adapted and romanticized My Fair Lady (1956 musical and 1964 film).

My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and on the 1938 film adaptation of the play, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady. Despite his cynical nature and difficulty understanding women, Higgins grows attached to her.

The musical's 1956 Broadway production was a notable critical and popular success, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It set a record for the longest run of any musical on Broadway up to that time and was followed by a hit London production. Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews starred in both productions. Many revivals have followed, and the 1964 film version won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

William Jesse Shirley (July 6, 1921 – August 27, 1989) was an American actor and tenor/lyric baritone singer who later became a Broadway theatre producer. He is perhaps best known as the speaking and singing voice of Prince Phillip in Walt Disney's 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty and for dubbing Jeremy Brett's singing voice in the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady.

The year 1964 in film involved some significant events, including three highly successful musical films, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Eliza Doolittle is a fictional character and the protagonist in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913) and its 1956 musical adaptation, My Fair Lady.

Eliza (from Lisson Grove, London) is a Cockney flower seller, who comes to Professor Henry Higgins asking for elocution lessons, after a chance encounter at Covent Garden. Higgins goes along with it for the purposes of a wager: That he can turn her into the toast of elite London society. Her Cockney dialect includes words that are common among working class Londoners, such as ain't; "I ain't done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman" said Doolittle.