An ‘Iggins in common with Harrison

Valerie Lawson
June 4, 2008

IT CAN’T be explained by late night drinking, but Richard E. Grant is happy to be “levitating in the middle of the night” as he thinks about his new role as Professor Henry Higgins.

The actor is a teetotaller as well as a committed jogger who is stepping up his daily six-kilometre run so he can survive 80 performances of My Fair Lady in Sydney.

Playing the part of the arrogant professor, Grant is following in the footsteps of the Englishman, Rex Harrison, who created Higgins on Broadway and reprised the role in the 1964 movie.

Grant, 51, who has never sung on stage, takes comfort in the fact “the role was written for an actor who was not a trained singer and had never done a musical”.

Grant and Harrison share the same charm and easy manner, but there is one big difference. Grant plays the toff to perfection, but he is not British.

Born in Swaziland, he has lived in Britain more than half his life, so he understands that in class-conscious and accent-aware Britain, an outsider is always an outsider.

Grant once said “the English class system is alive and well … [it is] one of the great sources of comedy and tragedy in English life”.

So it’s slightly ironic that he is to play Higgins – created by George Bernard Shaw for Pygmalion – one of the great snobs of the British theatre.

Grant sees Higgins as both a “bully” and “more than anything, a classic public school boy who lives in this hermetically sealed world of phonetics and science”.

Using his skills in detecting dialects and fine tuning accents, Higgins transforms the cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (played by Taryn Fiebig in the Australian production), into a facsimile of an English lady and in so doing, liberates her from the destiny of her class.

So has the British class system really changed since Pygmalion came to the London stage in 1914? “In one sense Henry Higgins had a very narrow idea that there was only one way to speak the English language, which was his way,” Grant says.

“That’s obviously disproved, in that everyone can speak English wherever you live, and however you speak is legitimate. But [in Britain] I think that where people go to school or how they speak, whether posh, middle or lower, has a huge impact on what kind of job you get.

“I grew up in Swaziland [his family story is told in his movie Wah-Wah] when it was mired in a 1960s sensibility. The kind of English spoken where I grew up was a period English sound and when I came to England people said how strange.

“Charles Sturridge, who directed Brideshead Revisited for television, said ‘you speak English like someone from the 1950s’.”

Which clearly helped him adapt to his roles over three decades from the dissolute Withnail in the 1980s in Withnail & I, to a servant in Gosford Park to Lord Warburton in The Portrait Of A Lady and to several incarnations of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Grant says he has no idea why Opera Australia chose him to play Higgins in its commercial season of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal from October and is aware of the sensitivity of stepping into a role created by Reg Livermore for Opera Australia’s national subscription season, which opens in Sydney on June 21.

He knows “there’s a risk in someone from outside taking over from someone who is as loved and legendary as he [Livermore] is”, but he also points out he is closer in age to Fiebig than the 69-year-old Livermore and also closer in age than were Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews who played the original Higgins and Eliza on stage. This, he suggests, offers “more possibility of subliminal romance”.

Grant, a talented writer, has been doing his research on transformation stories.

There are clear analogies in creation fantasies in movies, from Lars And The Real Girl to Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite as well as in mythology and fairytales, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pinocchio, Cinderella and Dr Frankenstein’s monster.

“Higgins sees Eliza as entirely someone without feelings, in the same way as Dr Frankenstein creates his monster … [but] he, having been the puppeteer or the Svengali to the Trilby pulling the strings, is having his heart strings pulled by Eliza at the end.”

As for Eliza, “she’s got this line ‘I could have danced all night’ , so even from the brief tango they do, The Rain In Spain, and subsequently at the embassy ball when he dances with her, he can’t have been such a Neanderthal that his charm does not have some effect on her”.

Grant is preparing for the part with the help of his wife, a voice coach, and a singing teacher who has told him to “sing it full out as though you are doing Ethel Merman to the back of the stalls”, although he will speak the lyrics, like Harrison.

When some actors have sung the role, “it robs the lyrics of some of the wit”, he says.

“Charles Sturridge, who directed Brideshead Revisited for television, said ‘you speak English like someone from the 1950s’.”

Which clearly helped him adapt to his roles over three decades from the dissolute Withnail in the 1980s in Withnail & I, to a servant in Gosford Park to Lord Warburton in The Portrait Of A Lady and to several incarnations of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Grant says he has no idea why Opera Australia chose him to play Higgins in its commercial season of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal from October and is aware of the sensitivity of stepping into a role created by Reg Livermore for Opera Australia’s national subscription season, which opens in Sydney on June 21.

He knows “there’s a risk in someone from outside taking over from someone who is as loved and legendary as he [Livermore] is”, but he also points out he is closer in age to Fiebig than the 69-year-old Livermore and also closer in age than were Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews who played the original Higgins and Eliza on stage. This, he suggests, offers “more possibility of subliminal romance”.

Grant, a talented writer, has been doing his research on transformation stories.

There are clear analogies in creation fantasies in movies, from Lars And The Real Girl to Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite as well as in mythology and fairytales, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pinocchio, Cinderella and Dr Frankenstein’s monster.

“Higgins sees Eliza as entirely someone without feelings, in the same way as Dr Frankenstein creates his monster … [but] he, having been the puppeteer or the Svengali to the Trilby pulling the strings, is having his heart strings pulled by Eliza at the end.”

As for Eliza, “she’s got this line ‘I could have danced all night’ , so even from the brief tango they do, The Rain In Spain, and subsequently at the embassy ball when he dances with her, he can’t have been such a Neanderthal that his charm does not have some effect on her”.

Grant is preparing for the part with the help of his wife, a voice coach, and a singing teacher who has told him to “sing it full out as though you are doing Ethel Merman to the back of the stalls”, although he will speak the lyrics, like Harrison.

When some actors have sung the role, “it robs the lyrics of some of the wit”, he says.