Now meet the real Professor Higgins

Not long after Peter Ladefoged moved from Scotland to Los Angeles to become an assistant professor of linguistics at UCLA, he received a call from legendary director George Cukor.

“I had no idea who he was,” says Ladefoged, now 78 and a research linguist/professor emeritus at UCLA.

“I was not a movie buff.”

But when Cukor explained he was directing the movie version of the musical “My Fair Lady” -- the Lerner-Loewe musical about a British phonetician named Henry Higgins and a Cockney flower girl named Eliza -- the professor agreed to meet with him.

Cukor wanted an expert to help his star Rex Harrison behave like a phonetician. “My immediate answer was, ‘I don’t have a singing butler and three maids who sing, but I will tell you what I can as an assistant professor.’ ” The results were memorable -- if not entirely authentic.

Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the Alex Film Society will present two screenings of “My Fair Lady” in honor of the Oscar-winning musical’s 40th anniversary. The restored version of the film will screen in SuperPanavision widescreen at 2 and 8 p.m. Ladefoged will appear at the afternoon screening; Oscar-winning art director Gene Allen will participate in the evening festivities.

“I am going to answer questions and tell them what it was like on the set,” Ladefoged says. “And how Audrey Hepburn would come in and say, ‘Would you like a cookie? I baked them myself last night.’ They were good cookies. You know, when you make a movie, half the time is spent sitting around while they rearrange things. During that time, she was very charming and very friendly.”

And so was Harrison, who won the best actor Oscar as Higgins, the role he originated on Broadway in 1956. “He said to me that he had been playing the part for many years on stage, but he didn’t know about phonetics. He wanted to point to the right symbols [on the chart], so when he said a certain sound and pointed to a symbol, he would get it right.”

One of Ladefoged’s principal tasks on the set was offering guidance “on what kind of [phonetic] machines there would be for that time,” including the device that Higgins uses with Eliza to help with her “h” sound.

“That is an absolutely authentic machine, totally misused,” Ladefoged says. “It is meant to do something completely different. There is that revolving mirror and the motion is like a stroboscope viewing of a sound wave. But in the movie, the mirror doesn’t revolve right. I told them about it, but they said, ‘It gets a laugh.’ So I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Still, Ladefoged did get Harrison to “point more or less at the correct symbols. I was very lucky. I had a professor who wanted everybody to know about the history of phonetics. I did know about the history of the 19th century and early 20th century phonetics, and the chart [he uses] is fairly authentic as to what would have been in use at that time in the symbols.”

Ladefoged’s voice is heard on the soundtrack when Higgins plays the phonograph of different sounds, and he wrote out the sounds in the notebook Higgins uses in the opening number, “Why Can’t the English.”

“I write it down in 19th century, exactly what she had said. It is sort of an organic alphabet, where the shape of every letter reflects each particular sound.”

Though Ladefoged officially retired in 1991, he still teaches and is involved in numerous research projects.

“I do quite a lot of work in voice identification-type stuff in criminal cases,” he says. “I have two cases running at the moment. They usually vary from things like drug busts to threatening calls to abusive calls on the telephone.”

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‘My Fair Lady’

Where: Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale

When: 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday

Price: $8 at 2 p.m.; $9.50 at 8 p.m.

Contact: (818) 243-2539; www.alexfilmsociety.org