Before becoming a Broadway box office musical, My Fair Lady was a 1913 play and a 1938 film, Pygmalion, produced by George Bernard Shaw. "Eliza Doolittle" was the lead character. Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews were the most famous actresses cast in the several iterations of My Fair Lady. But for today s purposes, neither Shaw, Andrews, or Hepburn ever knew a more fair or genteel lady than my Birtie Preston.