50 Fun Facts About Pygmalion

Shaw's Pygmalion opens with Londoners sheltering from rain under a church portico in which district?

Covent Garden is home to St Paul's, nicknamed the actors' church, whose portico was designed by Inigo Jones. Shaw used it to crowd people in evening dress beside a street seller.

In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins boasts that within months he could pass Eliza Doolittle off as what?

A duchess is the target of the bet: Colonel Pickering offers to pay for every lesson if Higgins can manage it in six months.

Which actress played Eliza Doolittle in the 1964 film My Fair Lady, the musical version of Pygmalion?

Audrey Hepburn took the role from Julie Andrews, who had played Eliza on Broadway, and most of her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon.

Shaw named Pygmalion after a figure of Greek myth who fell in love with his own work in which craft?

Sculptor Pygmalion carved an ivory woman so lifelike that he fell in love with her, and a goddess brought her to life. Higgins shapes Eliza in the same way, using speech instead of ivory.

Which swear word spoken by Eliza Doolittle created a sensation when Pygmalion opened in London in 1914?

Bloody caused such a sensation that for years afterwards the word itself was nicknamed a pygmalion. The actress who spoke it in London was thought to be risking her career.

In Pygmalion, what does a furious Eliza Doolittle throw at Henry Higgins after he wins his bet?

His slippers hit him after Higgins and Pickering spend the evening congratulating each other and ignoring Eliza. She had fetched them for him moments earlier.

George Bernard Shaw, already a Nobel laureate, won which honour for the 1938 film of his play Pygmalion?

An Academy Award for the screenplay made Shaw the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. He called it an insult, coming from Hollywood.

Which 1999 teen comedy about a bet to turn an arty outsider into prom queen is a reworking of Pygmalion?

She's All That swaps the professor for a high-school jock and the street seller for an art student. It was remade in 2021, with the roles reversed, as He's All That.

Pygmalion was first staged not in London but in a German translation in which European capital?

Vienna saw Pygmalion at the Hofburg Theatre nearly six months before London did. The English opening was held up partly by its leading lady's nervous breakdown.

George Bernard Shaw, who mocked the English class system in Pygmalion, was born in which city?

Dublin was Shaw's home until 1876, when he moved to London and struggled for years as a novelist before turning to plays.

Which working-class dialect does Eliza Doolittle speak before Henry Higgins retrains her in Pygmalion?

Cockney is the speech of working-class Londoners, and it is the sheer strength of Eliza's that tempts Higgins into accepting the wager.

In Pygmalion, what job does Eliza's father Alfred Doolittle do before an unexpected fortune makes him respectable?

Dustman Alfred Doolittle arrives as if to demand his daughter back, then cheerfully lets her stay in exchange for five pounds.

Henry Higgins, who can place a stranger's birthplace from a few words in Pygmalion, is a professor of what?

Phonetics fascinated Shaw, who drew Higgins partly on real British experts in the field and wrote a preface to the play about them.

In Pygmalion, what post does Mrs Pearce hold in Henry Higgins's home, where she bathes and reclothes Eliza?

Housekeeper Mrs Pearce is the first to ask what will become of Eliza once the experiment ends, and she scolds Higgins for swearing in front of the girl.

In the prose sequel Shaw added to Pygmalion, which of the play's men does Eliza Doolittle finally marry?

Freddy is the penniless young admirer Eliza chooses. Their troubles afterwards, Shaw wrote, were economic rather than romantic, since he had no money and no occupation.

For which star actress, aged 49 at the London premiere, did Shaw write the part of Eliza in Pygmalion?

Mrs Patrick Campbell had the part written expressly for her, and her passionate but unconsummated affair with Shaw produced a legendary exchange of letters.

For her first social outing in Pygmalion, Henry Higgins restricts Eliza Doolittle to which two safe subjects?

Weather and health sound harmless until Eliza, in flawless vowels, turns the second topic into dark gossip about a suspicious death in her family.

In Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle first asks Henry Higgins for speech lessons hoping to get a job where?

A flower shop is her way off the street corner where she sells violets, and she knows no owner will hire her until she talks like a lady.

Which actor played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, the musical of Pygmalion, on both Broadway and film?

Rex Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar for the film, having landed the stage role only after Noël Coward turned it down and suggested him.

ELIZA, a 1960s computer program named after the heroine of Shaw's Pygmalion, was an early example of what?

A chatbot that imitated a psychotherapist, ELIZA got its name because, like Shaw's heroine, it could be taught to speak better.

In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins keeps his laboratory at which London address, also home to the poet Elizabeth Barrett?

Wimpole Street, in Marylebone, gives Higgins the house number 27a, which the musical My Fair Lady kept for him.

In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins hears Eliza speak and correctly names which part of London as her birthplace?

Lisson Grove is where Higgins places her from a few words, before tracking the gentleman beside her through Cheltenham, Harrow and Cambridge.

Colonel Pickering, who funds Eliza's lessons in Pygmalion, is a scholar of the dialects of which country?

India gave Pickering his subject, and he has come to London expressly to meet Higgins when the two run into each other by chance.

In Pygmalion, Alfred Doolittle proudly counts himself among which group, shut out by middle-class morality?

The undeserving poor is his own label for men like himself, and the speech so delights Higgins that he hands over five pounds.

Shaw's preface to Pygmalion says Professor Higgins has touches of which famously prickly Oxford language scholar?

Henry Sweet was the cantankerous Oxford expert Shaw had most in mind, though the preface insists that Higgins is not a portrait of him.

Shaw, who attacks English spelling in the preface to Pygmalion, left money in his will to create what?

A new alphabet was meant to match letters to sounds, and the money paid for an edition of his play Androcles and the Lion printed in the Shavian script.

Which star, soon to play Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, was Henry Higgins in the 1938 film Pygmalion?

Leslie Howard also co-directed the film, and the part brought him a Best Actor nomination and the top acting prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Which songwriting team turned Shaw's Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, the Broadway musical that opened in 1956?

Lerner and Loewe succeeded where Rodgers and Hammerstein had given up, once they saw the play needed little beyond showing what happens between its acts.

Shaw barred musicals of Pygmalion after a bad experience with The Chocolate Soldier, an operetta based on which play?

Arms and the Man became an operetta in 1908, and the experience left Shaw so sour that Pygmalion stayed unsung until after he died in 1950.

In psychology's Pygmalion effect, which factor, supplied by teachers or bosses, lifts a person's performance?

High expectations were put to the test in Pygmalion in the Classroom, a much-debated study of how teachers' beliefs about their pupils shaped the pupils' results.

After fleeing Henry Higgins's house in Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle takes refuge with which member of his family?

His mother takes Eliza's side, scolding Higgins and Pickering for behaving as though the girl were their property.

What happens between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins in the final moments of Shaw's original Pygmalion?

She walks out with dignity, declining to run his errands, and the curtain falls on Higgins alone and laughing to himself.

My Fair Lady moves Eliza's first public tryout from a Pygmalion drawing room to which famous English racecourse?

Ascot replaces the play's afternoon tea, and the result is the same: Eliza forgets herself, this time while cheering on a horse, and shocks everyone.

In Act Five of Pygmalion, Eliza and Colonel Pickering leave for which ceremony at St George's, Hanover Square?

Her father's wedding to her stepmother is one more burden of his sudden wealth, which he complains has forced respectability on him.

Later writers gave which name to the woman brought to life for the mythical Pygmalion?

Galatea was borrowed from a sea-nymph, and Shaw used the name too, telling his first Eliza that her final rebellion is the statue coming to life at last.

Which Roman poet's Metamorphoses gives the best-known version of the Pygmalion myth behind Shaw's title?

Ovid tells it in Book 10, where the hero is so disgusted by the women around him that he vows to stay celibate, rather like Higgins the confirmed bachelor.

In Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle says the real difference between a lady and a street seller lies in what?

How she is treated, Eliza says, is what makes a lady, and she credits Pickering's good manners rather than Higgins's lessons for changing her.

At the embassy in Pygmalion, the interpreter Nepommuck declares Eliza Doolittle a princess of which nationality?

Hungarian and of royal blood is his verdict, reached because her English is too perfect to be that of a native speaker.

In Act Four of Pygmalion, what does Henry Higgins fling into the fireplace before Eliza retrieves it?

A ring he had bought her is what she hands back along with the hired jewels, and the gesture stings Higgins into losing his temper.

Flush with Henry Higgins's coins in Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle grandly tells her driver to head for where?

Buckingham Palace is only for show: she soon redirects the driver to her modest lodging in Angel Court, off Drury Lane.

In Pygmalion, what suddenly lifts Eliza's father Alfred Doolittle out of poverty, much to his own disgust?

An American's bequest of three thousand pounds a year arrives because Higgins once wrote, as a joke, that Doolittle was England's most original moralist.

In Act One of Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle panics on taking the note-scribbling Henry Higgins for what?

A police informer could ruin a street seller's respectability, so Eliza protests loudly that she has done nothing wrong while Higgins is merely noting down her vowels.

Which coin does Eliza offer Henry Higgins per lesson in Pygmalion, a large slice of her daily earnings?

A shilling impresses Higgins once he works it out as a share of her income: from a millionaire, he reckons, the same proportion would be the biggest fee he was ever offered.

Shaw, who skewers the class system in Pygmalion, was the leading pamphleteer of which gradualist socialist group?

The Fabian Society wanted socialism by gradual reform rather than revolution, and Shaw turned up at one of its meetings in 1884 after reading one of its tracts.

Which actor-manager, London's first Henry Higgins, infuriated Shaw by changing the ending of Pygmalion?

Herbert Beerbohm Tree told Shaw that his new ending made money; Shaw called it damnable and answered with a printed sequel.

At an at-home in Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle startles the guests by doubting that her aunt really died of what?

Influenza was the family's story, but Eliza insists the old woman was done in, and delivers the gossip in perfect drawing-room vowels.

In Act Two of Pygmalion, a freshly scrubbed Eliza Doolittle astonishes her father by reappearing in which garment?

A Japanese kimono is what she is given after Higgins orders her old clothes burned, and Alfred Doolittle steps politely aside, taking her for a stranger.

Eliza Doolittle's social debut in Pygmalion happens at an at-home on the Embankment of which London district?

Chelsea suits the hostess, raised on William Morris and Burne-Jones: Shaw's stage directions give her an uncluttered room hung with good paintings.

Which future director of Lawrence of Arabia worked as film editor on the 1938 screen version of Pygmalion?

David Lean edited the film and also directed its montage sequence of Higgins teaching Eliza, though the directing credits went to others.

Shaw's full title calls Pygmalion which kind of work in five acts, a label he defended in his sequel?

A romance in the old sense of an improbable tale, Shaw argued: the label refers to Eliza's transformation, not to a love story.