Eliza Mulligan-Doolittle

...Just you wait Henry Higgins. Just you wait.

You'll be sorry but your tears'll be too late.....>>>......

Audrey Hepburn and the latest "new Audrey Hepburn" Carey Mulligan

So it looks like the remake of 1964's Best Picture My Fair Lady is going to happen after all. Carey Mulligan will be playing Eliza Doolittle instead of Keira Knightley as previously reported. Now, this is why I don't spend hundreds of posts tracking every pre-production film the way most sites do -- well, that and the time and the lack of staff and the preference for actual movies rather than movies no one will see for another year or three -- because things are always in flux. The Carey Mulligan news is also a handy illustration of why I never trust either rumors or denials. It was less than a month ago that Mulligan said there was zero truth to the rumor.

This seems like a risky move to me. Mulligan's already got the 'new Audrey Hepburn' tag as she worked the fashions with stick thin elegance all awards season. Maybe her agents aren't worried. After all every young actress must suffer the "new so and so" thing as they come into their stardom. [tangent: There was even a time --shudder with me now -- that Entertainment Weekly tried to call Julianne Moore the new Julia Roberts. I'm like an elephant. I never forget. Could any two actresses be more different?] But it's one thing to be labelled "the next so and so". It's quite another to be labelled so and then sign up to take on one of their signature roles. It's risking direct comparison. And who wants to risk comparison to one of the greatest movie stars of all time?

I don't exactly object to My Fair Lady being remade (though I assumed it would be a non-musical version when I first heard the news) and I'm thrilled that Emma Thompson is involved. That's a sure sign that the book inbetween the classic score will be witty. In truth I'm just happy that any musical is still getting made after Nine's bombing. See, Hollywood has a way of assuming that one thing equals every other thing ("Avatar made billions. Therefore ALL movies will make billions if we convert them to 3D!") so I feared Nine's financial blood bath would spell the end of the musical resurgence despite all the musical hits that directly preceded it.

Carey & Anne & Keira, Doolittle Triplets

I have no idea if Carey Mulligan can sing or not but this is yet another situation where we have a movie musical happening and Anne Hathaway is not starring in it. What is going on here? If any single actress from Young Hollywood should be doing musicals, it's her. She's the only one who has made it completely obvious that she was born for it. And yet nothing. Still. (And I don't think they'll let her do her own singing as Judy Garland in that biopic, you know?) And you'd think Hathaway would be a total fit for Eliza. Hollywood loves to see actors repeating themselves and Hathaway has had a lot of training at Pygmalian-esque screen make-overs (The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada).

If the movie does happen (we're still early in the process mind you), I will die with curiousity waiting for Oscar to react. The original My Fair Lady was a huge Oscar sensation but for Audrey herself who wasn't even nominated, despite it being one of her three signature roles (the others obviously being "Holly Golightly" and "Princess Ann"). It's widely believed she was snubbed as misplaced karmic punishment for winning the role when the producers deemed Julie Andrews (who originated it on Broadway) unfit to sell a movie, having no previous film experience. Andrews got the last laugh becoming a huge film star that same year, winning the Oscar for Mary Poppins and chasing it with The Sound of Music, one of the biggest box office behemoths of all time.