Moyna MacGill is the only performer to appear in both this film (Woman Bystander) and its musical remake, My Fair Lady (Lady Boxington). Both films were also photographed by Harry Stradling Sr.
Charles Laughton was Shaw's first choice to play Professor Henry Higgins.
Wendy Hiller was personally chosen to play the part of Eliza Doolittle by author George Bernard Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw had previously rejected an offer from Samuel Goldwyn for the screen rights to his plays. He was more impressed with Gabriel Pascal's integrity as a producer, thus beginning a partnership that yielded adaptations of Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.
George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have won both the Academy Award and the Nobel Prize. Some sources incorrectly list former US vice president Al Gore as another person who won both prizes. Al Gore did win the Nobel Peace Prize; however, the Oscar for Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth was given to the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.
George Bernard Shaw wrote the ballroom scene especially for this movie.
George Bernard Shaw's original play opened in London on 11 April 1914.
Wilfrid Lawson was only 38 when he played Eliza Doolittle's father.
Although he expressed indifference to the Academy Award he won for writing this movie, his friend Mary Pickford reported that George Bernard Shaw proudly displayed his Oscar in his home, and showed it off to his visitors.
First film of Stephen Murray.
In British prints, Leslie Howard utters the word "damn". In American prints he says either "hang" or "confounded". This was a year before David O. Selznick famously tussled with the Hays Office over permission for Clark Gable to say "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" at the end of Gone with the Wind
The first British film to use the word "bloody" in its dialogue.
The new character that George Bernard Shaw wrote for the ball scene - the Hungarian Karpathy - was modeled on producer Gabriel Pascal
The original Broadway production of "Pgymalion" opened at the Park Theater opening October 12, 1914 and ran for 72 performances. The play premiered in a German translation at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on October 16, 1913 and in English at His Majesty's Theatre in London on April 11, 1914 and starred 'Mrs Patrick Campbell'.
The play originally ended with Eliza going off to marry Freddy. George Bernard Shaw wrote a "sequel", actually a body of text documenting what happens after Eliza marries Freddy.
The property buyer is manning one of the market stalls at the beginning - Baden Siddall.
The scene in which Eliza accidentally swallows a marble whilst having an elocution lesson does not appear in the original play. During rehearsals for this scene a pained expression came over Wendy Hiller's face; when she spat out the marbles she had in her mouth she said: "Leslie, I've swallowed one!" to which Leslie Howard replied "Never mind there are plenty more". This caused such amusement among the watching crew that it was added to the film.
When Shaw died in 1950, his home in Ayot St Lawrence became a museum. One of the artefacts in it is his Oscar, which initially had become so tarnished that the curator assumed it had no value and had been using it as a door stop. That situation has since been rectified.