Inevitably, the original soundtrack to
My Fair Lady is remembered, like the film, for the absence of
Julie Andrews, who starred in the Broadway and London stage productions, but was deemed, at least at the time when the casting decision had to be made, not enough of a star to carry the movie. (Embarrassingly, by the time the movie opened, Mary Poppins had made her more than enough of a star to do so.) Instead,
Audrey Hepburn stepped into the role of the pre-World War I London flower girl Eliza Doolittle, who aspires to a better accent and the social advantages that will come with it. Ironically,
Hepburn's voice was dubbed by
Marni Nixon when it came to singing. (
Nixon was an accomplished Hollywood voice ghost, having previously sung for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story, among other assignments.) Rex Harrison re-created his stage role as the elocutionist, Professor Henry Higgins (he had also appeared in the film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, the source for
My Fair Lady), as did
Stanley Holloway, as Eliza's flamboyant Cockney father. It was good that Harrison and
Holloway got to immortalize their performances on film, but since both were making their third recordings of the score, they didn't have much to add.
Nixon (no doubt with bits of
Hepburn here and there) was fine, but the composite performance lacked the flair that
Andrews would have given it. The result was an acceptable recording that did not surpass the Broadway or London cast albums. [The 1994 CD reissue adds a number of choral and orchestral interludes, as well as reprises of a few songs.] ~ William Ruhlmann