Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, along with American songwriter Bob Dylan, are the only two people to achieve literary and cinematic harmony: winning both the Nobel and the Oscar. Bernard Shaw won his Nobel for the screenplay Pygmalion, which was made into a movie and was credited with elevating Hollywood from illiteracy to literacy. Bernard Shaw claimed to hate the award, though that didn’t stop him from plonking it on his mantlepiece. Pygmalion would later be remade as My Fair Lady and become a cultural milestone of metamorphosis, held up as proof that speaking proper English can solve all the world’s problems.
For all the non-Macaulayputras here, My Fair Lady is a musical about a phonetics professor named Professor Henry Higgins who deems that he will teach a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle how to speak English ‘properly’ so that she can pass muster at the Royal Ascot.
