Best Actor 1964: Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady

Rex Harrison won his only Oscar from his second and final Oscar nomination for playing Professor Henry Higgins an English professor who decides to mold a flower girl into a proper lady.

My Fair Lady is one of the over the top 60's musicals. I did kind of enjoy it well enough, even though it is a bit too long, and slightly too slow at times.

Rex Harrison is a lead in a musical, but he really does not sing any songs. He strangely talks through them instead. It is a bizarre method but it does work for the character who is a bit too stuck up to sing. That really represents his whole performance though. Everything he does in the performance no matter how strange it seems to be it works very well for the character. He never really changes his facade very much and even when he does it is very minimal. But again that seems exactly as Higgins should be. Harrison really does play Higgins definitively. Would anyone else really seem correct in his role, I do not think so. Harrison simply personifies Higgins perfectly. Harrison never does falter and always comes off correctly as the overly proper English professor. Harrison plays the role with the proper amount of determination and humor. His posture and mannerisms are always positively proper and his arm gestures and everything else. Harrison is always somewhat enjoyable to watch in this, because he stays the same way basically throughout the film. His role though is not one of over complication because of this. Everything is fairly on the surface with this performance, and he is not entertaining as some performances.