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(Warner Bros.)/(Good Times)
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When Julie Andrews was cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, she was a relative unknown whose only previous Broadway role was the ingénue lead in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend. New York fell in love with her, and we can see her radiant poignance in a thrilling clip from The Ed Sullivan Show of her singing and dancing in "Wouldn’t It Be Loverly," five years after the show opened. Best of the Broadway Musicals, a DVD of "classic performances from The Sullivan Show," also includes Celeste Holm in "I Cain’t Say No," the number that brought her stardom in Oklahoma!, Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert in West Side Story’s "Tonight," and Andrews again in a heavenly song and dance with Richard Burton from Camelot. As usual, Hollywood chose a big star for the film — Audrey Hepburn, who was also wonderful, especially in the later transformation scenes. According to the superb "making-of" documentary that’s now included on the new double-disc My Fair Lady motion-picture DVD, with narration by co-star Jeremy Brett, Hepburn was desperate to do her own singing (as was Brett, who didn’t get to use his own voice for "On the Street Where You Live"). She actually filmed at least two songs, "Wouldn’t It Be Loverly" and "Show Me," lip-synching to her own voice (even the old single My Fair Lady DVD includes this footage as a bonus). Both songs take on a dimension of character missing in the film itself, where soprano Marni Nixon’s generic British operetta voice erases Hepburn’s irresistible vocal personality. Was it fate or karma that Hepburn was one of the few people connected with My Fair Lady who wasn’t nominated for an Oscar (because she didn’t do her own singing?), and that Julie Andrews won for Mary Poppins. Both DVDs are indispensable for the full fascinating picture.
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