Keira Knightley is a Very Fair Lady Indeed

My Fair Lady is my favorite musical because, if the film didn’t have a single song in it, there would still be a wonderful story in place. Much of it is the casting. Even though Julie Andrews played Eliza Doolittle in the stage version and also went on to star in The Sound of Music, it is hard to imagine anyone besides Audrey Hepburn transforming from shrieking Cockney flower girl into a tame and erudite high class woman.

And so it came as some surprise to learn that not only is a remake of My Fair Lady being planned, as the Telegraph reports, but that Keira Knightley has beaten out Scarlett Johansson for the role of Eliza Doolittle. It’s hard to imagine someone so restrained and “practiced” in the role, but then, it’s hard to imagine Eliza Doolittle’s voice being emitted from an actual person (and not, say, a garbage disposal) until you’ve actually heard it. It has been reported that Knightley underwent singing lessons in preparation for My Fair Lady, but she is not unfamiliar to such roles, having previously sung several tracks in The Edge of Love.

The film is being directed by Joe Wright, who is best known for the excellent films Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, but might have run aground with The Soloist. Academy Award-winner (for Sense and Sensibility) Emma Thompson is writing the screenplay. Daniel Craig is also being mentioned as a possibility to play Professor Henry Higgins (or, as Eliza would say, ‘enry ‘iggens). Craig can be very cool in his roles,  so I would be interested to see if he could be as dismissive and impetuous as the professor.

I don’t actually expect a remake to surpass the previous iterations in quality, if only because of the odds of it, but this project is interesting since the Victorian comedic sensibility of rich, high class individuals doing lascivious and scandelous things has been utterly lost. Now comedy has been given over to those vulgar characters who have some sort of mental or social defects, which is not to disparage that style, but only to point out that My Fair Lady is an anachronism today, and that makes an update interesting, if it’s anything.