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There is, of course, a rather infamous Anglo Saxon
word that today remains the top taboo word in the
English language. Another Anglo Saxon word that
caused a storm 100 years ago was bloody. The storm
was the kind that comes in a tea cup and is played out
in the pages of the popular press. On 11 April 1914
the following headline screamed out from the front
page of The Daily Sketch:
Tonight’s Pygmalion in which Mrs Patrick Campbell
is expected to cause the greatest theatrical sensation
for years.
It’s very wordy isn’t it? No doubt The Sun today
would today go for something more pithy:
Patsy’s Pygmalion Profanity Shocks West End!
George Bernard Shaw’s play called for Mrs Campbell
as Eliza Doolittle to say
Not bloody likely.
In 1979 I was to cause far less outrage but a fair
amount of sniggering when I said that very line in a
Bexley Technical High School for Girls production.
But the only one outraged I think was me – brow
beaten into the Pygmalion role on account that I
would need to work very hard at the accent by the
very same people who had done their utmost to rid
me of it.
George Bernard Shaw’s play about the Cockney
flower-seller-turned-lady was made widely famous in
popular culture when it opened on Broadway as the
Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady with Rex
Harrison and Julie Andrews. Stanley Holloway
played Eliza’s dustman father. My Fair Lady is meant
to be a Cockney pronunciation of Mayfair Lady.
Audrey Hepburn would controversially replace Julie
Andrews in the 1964 MGM movie with Marni Nixon
doing the singing. Julie Andrews had the last laugh
winning that year’s Oscar for Mary Poppins while
Rex Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar (Noel
Coward must have been kicking himself for turning
the part down).
Shaw named his play after the ancient Greek
mythological story of Pygmalion, retold by the
Roman poet Ovid. Pygmalion, a sculptor, lost interest
in the immoral women of Cyprus when Venus had
punished their immorality by turning them all to
prostitution. The women in consequence had lost all
of their warmth and turned to stone which inspired
Pygmalion to create his own ideal woman out of
marble. Pygmalion falls in love with his marble lady
and taking pity on the lonely artist the goddess
Aphrodite, or Venus, makes the statue come to life
with a kiss.
Lord Frederic Leighton was a sculptor and painter
living alone in the only bedroom in his extraordinary
Arabic fantasy of a studio house in London’s Holland
Park. Leighton never married and he guarded his
private life with such rigour that to this day no one is
really sure if he even had such a thing.
The Eliza Doolittle of Holland Park