Professor Henry Higgins is a character featured in the 1964 film My Fair Lady who was portrayed by Rex Harrison. As a professor of phonetics, Higgins makes a bet that he can teach Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (performed 1913). The story was filmed in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Henry Higgins, and was adapted as the stage musical My Fair Lady in 1956 (filmed 1964), with Rex Harrison as the professor (on both stage and screen).
Appearance[]
Higgins is a brilliant linguist, who studies phonetics and documents different dialects and ways of speaking. He first appears as the suspicious man in the back of the crowd jotting down notes on everyone's manner of speech. Higgins is so focused on his academic interest that he lacks empathy and fails to consider other people's feelings or concerns. Instead, he sees people mainly as subjects of study. He views Eliza, for example, as an experiment and a "phonetic job." He doesn't so much invite Eliza to stay with him and learn to speak like a lady but rather orders her to. Higgins is rude not only to Eliza but generally to everyone he meets. He is impatient with class hierarchy and the Victorian obsession with manners. As he tells Eliza, he treats everyone the same (that is, rudely) regardless of social class. Thus, while an inconsiderate character—and often a misogynist—Higgins at least sees through the hypocrisy and fallacies of the Victorian social hierarchy, and relishes the opportunity to beat high society at its own game by making Eliza pass as a lady.
Personality[]
Henry Higgins, forty years old, is a bundle of paradoxes. In spite of his brilliant intellectual achievements, his manners are usually those of the worst sort of petulant, whining child. He is a combination of loveable eccentricities, brilliant achievements, and a devoted dedication to improving the human race. Yet he is completely socially inept; his manners are so bad that his own mother does not want him in her house when she has company, and his manners are so offensive that she will not attend the same church at the same time. Since manners have always been the subject matter of comedies from the time of Aristophanes, Higgins' view of manners differs greatly from his own actions. His use of phonetics to make a flower girl into a duchess does not mean that the film is about phonetics; the film concerns different definitions of manners, and thus Higgins' actions must be taken fully into account.
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