Cecil Beaton's Fair Lady

[Cecil Beaton]


In February 1963 Beaton arrived in Hollywood as the lead set and costume designer for the Warner Bros’ film production of My Fair Lady. Having worked on the stage version of Lerner and Lowe’s musical in 1956, Beaton was the obvious choice for the role. It was a high-point in his career. Over ten months he would perfect the costumes and scenes (including the infamous black-and-white Ascot set) that would go on to win him two Academy Awards for Colour Costume Design and Colour Art Direction. Beaton recorded the highs and lows of the project in diary format and published them in Cecil Beaton’s Fair Lady in 1964. The book is dedicated to the producer Jack Warner, ‘with gratitude’. The text is accompanied by a colour frontispiece of Audrey Hepburn in her Ascot costume, 32 plates of black-and-white photographs and 20 line drawings.


Cecil Beaton. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. London. November 1964. First edition, second impression. Hardback, octavo; black cloth-bound boards, gilt title to spine, dust jacket. 128 pages. Colour frontispiece, 32 hors texte plates of b&w photographs and 20 line drawings in the text. English. 220 x 145mm. 0.45kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, light ruffling to forecorners and spine ends, crease to rear flap, folds and edges reinforced with brown tape to verso, price-clipped; light lean to spine, slight spotting to top-edge, no inscriptions.