The Problem With My Fair Lady's Ending (And How To Fix It)

The tangled history of the ending to George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" and Lerner and Loewe's musical "My Fair Lady". Should Higgins and Eliza get together at the end?

Sources and further reading:

00:00 Intro
01:34 Pygmalion's Metamorphoses
03:18 Shavian Pygmalion
12:26 Pascal's Wager
15:00 What The Americans Did
20:35 What's To Become Of Me?

[ticketmanager]

I recently saw a community theatre production of MFL and the actress playing Eliza was already on stage, seated in Higgins’ chair, partly in shadow when he enters. Not noticing her, he plays the recording & when it stops, Eliza continues with the “I washed my face...” line. Higgins turns and shows a slight affront to her being in his chair. He asks where his slippers are & Eliza lifts her skirt slightly to show she is now wearing them. He smiles & nods, as if to say “Well played.” Lights fade...

[tinymxnticore]

In the original, Eliza never loses sight of her initial goal: refining herself so she can open a flower shop. She becomes independent and self-possessed, and along the way meets a gentleman who enthusiastically adores her. What more could you ask for in a happy ending?

[mollymarjorie]

The first time I saw My Fair Lady, I was upset that Eliza went crawling back to the jerk, rather than hooking up with the completely genuine guy who actually loves her, so it's nice to learn that Shaw felt the same way, even if he didn't win out.

[rachelwharton]

I saw My Fair Lady as a young teen, and all I knew was that the ending filled me with rage. I had felt such a sense of triumph when she left him, only for it all to come crashing down. Now, as an adult, I appreciate that I can actually unpack all that 😅

[spiritualanarchist]

What the ending needs is Eliza throwing a slipper full force, hitting Higgins in the head 😂

[gengis]

Shaw was such a visionary man that he anticipated the proper ending 80 years before we could understand it.

[tremorsfan]

What I love about the George Bernard Shaw is that he lived to the age of 94 and didn't even die of old age. He died falling off a ladder trying to prune an apple tree. Which begs the question of how long he would have lived if he hadn't decided to trim that tree.

[erubin]

I choose to believe Henry has gone insane and is actually hallucinating Eliza came back. It's more satisfying than the alternative.

[aeolia]

I did linguistics in uni, and even though I came from a theatre background this one thing I did not know till I started in my undergrad. The voice on the phonograph in the movie helping Eliza with her sounds is a recording of a real phonetics professor at the time, a British guy teaching at UCLA that wrote the intro to phonetics text book that most students still use to this day. He was the linguistics consultant on the set too. Peter Ladefoged

[RevolutionUtena]

I remember as a teenager snorting at Eliza going back to Higgins and my mother saying dismissively "well in the original she ends up with FREDDY" as if it was obvious that was a worse choice and meanwhile I was like "But Freddy LIKES her. He's kind of a fop but he's a NICE one." We were definitely at a stalemate so I'm glad to see a video that agrees with me!

[amandavigue]

Shaw wrote an essay explaining what happened to his characters after the play. It is included in some editions of Pygmalion. Eliza did marry Freddie. She got her flower shop, too. She and Freddie were poor, but respectable. Throughout, Shaw maintained that Higgins could only truly respect one woman -- his mother.

[abbyk.]

As a kid watching this hundreds of times, I thought she just visited Higgins like you would visit a father you had a falling out with. I thought she had married Freddie.

[markthompson]

I played Higgins last year and we found the solution in playing Higgins like a tired toddler throughout Act 2, irrational, emotional (all the things he accuses women of being as I was being dammed if I was ever going to validate any of the things Higgins says). For the 3 parts of "I've grown accustomed to her face", the first was played disdainful and bitter, section two was callous and wicked but section three was sobering; done like it was the most truthful thing he had ever spoken. We went out of our way to demonstrate that Higgins was basically showing himself his true colors and coming to realization that, in the same way he and Pickering had had an effect in Eliza, so too had she had an effect on him and that he needed to change. My Higgins had a meltdown, sobbing as the recoding played, real ugly, honest, cry. When she comes back in, she sat next to me on the couch and I choked out a quiet "Eliza?". I put out a hand, she takes it, I go to say something and nothing come out. I try again, nothing. I try one more time only for an errant thought to cross my mind. "Where the devil are my slippers?" asked in full and complete earnestness. She laughs, I realize I said the quiet part out loud and groan/laugh/cry and the lights fade to two friends unsure but hopeful for the future laughing at the dumb thing Higgins just said.

That final laugh of the two of us really uplifted that final music, it makes it a grand, hopeful, raw and honest ending. One that says, we don't know what's next, but things will be better and in my opinion is far more satisfying ending.

[Nothing_Israel]

The “Galatea!” ending works perfectly for modern audiences if they add a scene where Higgins foreshadows it by recounting the story of pygmalion to a friend.

[nancyanderson]

YOU MADE MY DAY! I am 85 years old and that ending galls me ALWAYS! You did it! You made it real, human, sane. As a battered woman myself, Julie, Nancy and Eliza gave me mere acceptance of the era-specific reality, but never any hope. I got out the hard way - left my kids and lived as a pariah from then on. My kids had food, clothing, shelter and a step mother who made a great wage. My sons got college, my daughter got to cheer them on, then got out and wrestled horrifically because she was drop dead gorgeous and got hooked into Hollywood. Thank you, thank you! Sanity is such clean air.

[rhov-anion]

When my family watched this when I was a kid, I cried out at the end, "Ewww, she hooks up with the MEAN OLD MAN?" My mother told me, "No, she's just visiting him as her former teacher." So I honestly didn't realize this was supposed to be a ROMANTIC ending. I haven't seen the musical since moving out of the house, but I rather like my mother's interpretation. She DID make it on her own, and she's only visiting him for tea.

[colleenmarin]

As a child, I saw Pickering and Higgins as 'consummate bachelors' without a hint of romantic tendencies towards the 'fair sex', so I assumed she came back to discuss her future business prospects with Pickering, and Higgins was pleased that he hadn't ruined their friendship. As an adult, I see the 1950s ending as Eliza coming back to teach him manners much in the way he had taught her phonetics, in addition to what I thought when I was a kid

[technicolorstatic]

I always imagined a last scene in a busy bustling flower shop with Colonel Pickering dropping in to visit Eliza and Freddie, and then Higgins steps in and delivers the "I washed my hands and face before I came" line to her, a way of asking forgiveness.

[abigaylebonham]

I think it would be clever if the movie ending was kept and Eliza’s reaction to the “wear the devil are my slippers” line was changed. Like imagine Eliza decided to come back to just see how Higgins would react, maybe hoping she could reconcile with him and give him another chance; only to be greeted with that line and after he says that to her she just sighs and turns back around and leaves for good.

[grutarg]

Another possible ending: While out walking Henry Higgins stops into Eliza's flower shop. He doesn't know it's her shop but he hears her speak from behind the flowers and recognizes her voice. They talk briefly, she sees him out, and locks up for the night. The camera stays in the shop with Eliza as she walks upstairs to her living space above. A reprise of "All I Want is a Room Somewhere" plays in the background as she sits in her enormous chair and watches Henry walk away down the street.

The problem with everything I've seen is that Eliza never gets a room of her own. In every version she is seen only in the space Henry Higgins owns and controls. That's why the scene in his mother's house is so important, it's now a space owned and controlled not by Henry, but by another woman. It's a step in the right direction, but it still is closely tied to Henry Higgins and is not Eliza's own. To move from there back to Henry's office just doesn't work on a symbolic level. She needs to end in her own space.