The play reached a much wider audience when it was transformed by Alan Jay Lerner into the musical MY FAIR LADY and later the film of the same title directed by George Cukor and starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn who replaced an irate Julie Andrews the star of the Broadway musical. In 1938 the play was made into an excellent movie, for which Shaw's screenplay won an Oscar, starring Leslie Howard as Professor Higgins. Patrick Campbell who appeared to be the only actress willing to say the taboo word 'bloody' spoken by her character Eliza Doolittle.

Shaw wrote PYGMALION for the actress Mrs. First Printing of one of Shaw's most popular plays, PYGMALION, a radical reworking of Ovid's classic tale with a feminist twist. Edward Newton as well as that of Maxwell Steinhardt, another famous collector and erstwhile president of the Shaw Society of America. In a custom slipcase bearing the bookplate of A. The last time a copy of this book came up for public sale was nearly fifty years ago, at Swann Auction Galleries in New York, May 6, 1976, lot 304. Few copies are known to exist, doubtless fewer in this sort of Fine, original condition (and with a most dignified provenance).

This 1913 unpublished proof copy is arguably the most desirable edition of Shaw's most famous play. Of the more than sixty plays that George Bernard Shaw wrote, PYGMALION is certainly his most widely admired work. In 1964, it was re-imagined as the Oscar-dominating film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. It was adapted into the 1938 film starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, and later into the famous musical play MY FAIR LADY with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. The title comes from Greek mythology wherein the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with his sculpture, a creator who falls in love with his creation, The plot of Shaw's play, in which an idealistic professor transforms an unsophisticated Cockney girl into a refined young lady, set in turn-of-the-century London, brings this concept to life.

Newton copy (Parke-Bernet, 1941), an exceedingly rare survival, here found in remarkably Fine original condition. Shaw often produced a tiny number of these proofs for use as prompt copies, in this case for the rehearsals of the first performances of PYGMALION in 1914 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London. First Edition, an unpublished 'rough' proof in original blue wrappers. PYGMALION: A PLAY IN FIVE ACTS: By a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Pygmalion by george bernard shaw