Thaindian News

August 14, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): Emma Thompson finds one of the greatest actresses of all times to be ‘fantastically twee’. Yes she means Audrey Hepburn, the actress who made a classic out of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Emma is now engaged in rewriting the screenplay of the 1964 hit musical ‘My Fair Lady’. She says that she is glad to do it because the older one wasn’t too good and she found that the actress who immortalized the character of Eliza Doolittle to be lacking in both acting as well as the singing department.

She adds that maybe she would have found Hepburn delightful if she had been acquainted with her personally but she didn’t and that was that. She also stated that the film achieved such success because of Cecil Beaton’s designs and Rex Harrison and Hepburn did not contribute much to it. Emma also felt that the extraordinary character of Doolittle needs to be interpreted in a totally new way.

Negotiations are already on for different roles and Carey Mulligan is being considered for the lead female character while Professor Higgins might be played by either Hugh Grant or Rupert Everett.

Emma Thompson had won an Oscar for the best adaptation of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ in 1996. She plans to give the story of ‘My Fair Lady’ a feminine twist now.

In the interviews given to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, Thompson says that Eliza Doolittle was sold into sexual slavery and the play is all about how women were used at that point of history. And the same story is prevalent even today. She reiterates that it had indeed been a great musical but what did it actually tell about the world?

Whatever be her beliefs, people in Hollywood certainly believed in Hepburn’s acting talent. She was nominated for the coveted Oscars five times and had won it for the ‘Roman Holiday’ in 1954. Her singing may not really have been up to the mark as her songs in the musical, ‘My Fair Lady’ had all been dubbed by Marni Nixon.