Though Noël Coward was thought of as a possibility, for Lerner there was only Rex Harrison, whom he considered the quintessential Prof. Now that an ideal Eliza Doolittle was waiting in the wings, the duo needed to locate her leading man. Lerner asked her to stay on call and not accept another project until they could confirm the rights to the show, and Andrews graciously agreed. Her name was Julie Andrews, and in voice, diction, presence, and beauty she was exquisite. Attending a performance of Sandy Wilson’s 1920s-style Broadway musical hit, The Boy Friend, Lerner and Loewe first laid eyes on an exceptionally poised 19-year-old English singer-actress. While attacking the thorny task of obtaining the rights to produce their show, the duo searched for a leading lady, now that Mary Martin was out of the picture.
Halliday later told Lerner and Loewe that Martin had paced back and forth all night muttering, “Richard, those boys have lost their talent.” They requested a preview, but after hearing some of the songs, the couple left without saying a word. The development of the score was still at a comparatively early stage when Broadway superstar Mary Martin and her husband, producer Richard Halliday, caught wind that a musical Pygmalion was in the works. Shaw’s characters were certainly strong and dynamic enough to stand on their own Lerner and Loewe’s great challenge was to create transitions that would compel them to express themselves through song. This meant a copious amount of dialogue, but Lerner insisted on retaining as much Shaw as possible. ” The foundation for their work would be the superb screenplay written by Shaw himself for Pascal’s 1938 film. With the ever-present problem of an unromantic plot, the duo finally achieved a breakthrough in realizing that, as Lerner later explained, they “could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion.
At first the task proposed by Pascal seemed too daunting (Rodgers and Hammerstein had previously made the attempt and given up) after all, how could anyone create a great contemporary musical without a love story? Lerner and Loewe abandoned the project, but after Pascal’s fruitless pursuit of Noël Coward and Cole Porter -two other musical-theater greats -they began again, starting work shortly after Pascal’s death in mid-1954. The instigator, film producer-director Gabriel Pascal, had previously fashioned brilliant film adaptations of four Shaw plays - Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion. Lerner and Loewe were already successful on Broadway ( Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon ) by 1952, when the idea of a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was suggested to them.
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