The film was a financial and critical success, and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay and three more nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Howard), and Best Actress (Hiller).

While transcribing the conversation of passers-by one evening, linguist Professor Higgins is mistaken for a policeman, causing protests from the Covent Garden flower seller Eliza Doolittle and various bystanders.

As the incident is being cleared up, Higgins talks to Colonel Pickering, a fellow scholar of languages and dialects, who has come from India in order to meet him.

There Higgins meets his former pupil, the Hungarian Count Aristid Karpathy, who has become famous for his ability to coach American heiresses in elocution and identify the origins of high society people from their way of speaking.

Higgins and Pickering fear that Eliza will be exposed by him, but she manages to deceive him so successfully that he takes her for a Hungarian princess - explaining that her English is too perfect to be that of a native speaker.

When Higgins scoffs at this, Eliza horrifies him by threatening to use her newly-learned talents to give elocution lessons and so gain economic independence.

Once the party leaves to attend the wedding, an upset Higgins returns home after a long walk and accidentally turns on a recording of Eliza's first visit.

As he listens, he is surprised to hear the real Eliza at the door to his study, mockingly quoting her former self by announcing, "I washed my face and hands before I come, I did".

The resulting Pygmalion scenario by Cecil Lewis and W. P. Lipscomb removed exposition unnecessary outside a theatrical context and added new scenes and dialogue by Shaw.

The film's behind the camera staff included David Lean (on his first major editing job; he also directed the montage sequence of Higgins teaching Eliza), set designer Laurence Irving and the camera operator Jack Hildyard (who later photographed Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sound Barrier and Hobson's Choice).

George Bernard Shaw, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, and W. P. Lipscomb[4] won the 1938 Academy Award for Writing (Adapted Screenplay).