Nathaniel Parker steps into the iconic shoes of Henry Higgins for MY FAIR LADY

Since it opened on Broadway in 1956, My Fair Lady has stood as one of the great works of the American musical theatre canon.

Adapted by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the show turns Shaw’s story of a phonetics professor remaking a Cockney flower girl into a “proper lady” into a score built around songs like “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Rex Harrison originated Henry Higgins on stage and reprised the role in the 1964 film opposite Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle, while Julie Andrews — who created Eliza on Broadway and in the West End — has remained closely associated with the show ever since.

The upcoming Australian production opens at the Sydney Opera House before transferring to Melbourne’s State Theatre, with Andrews returning in a directorial capacity a decade on from the show’s last local season. It arrives with a cast led by Reg Livermore, who himself once played Higgins, and Robyn Nevin.

Taking on Higgins is English actor Nathaniel Parker, stepping into a role that stretches back through Rex Harrison, Alex Jennings and Richard E Grant, among others, and doing so as his first-ever musical after a career built almost entirely on straight theatre and screen work. Parker trained at LAMDA and the National Youth Theatre, and has built an extensive career across stage and screen ever since. His theatre credits include an array of work for the Royal Shakespeare Company — among them A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Every Man in His Humour, Richard II, The Rover, The Storm and The Winter’s Tale — as well as Romeo & Juliet at the Young Vic, The Merchant of Venice, 50 Revolutions, Speed-the-Plow, The Audience, This House, An Ideal Husband, Operation Epsilon, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Separate Tables, The Browning Version and Ragdoll. He won an Olivier Award and earned a Tony nomination for his performance as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and picked up a further Olivier nomination for The Mirror and the Light. More recently, he completed a role in the second series of PBS’s Maigret, performed An Evening of TS Eliot, and appeared in the 2025 film Desperate Journey and the TV mini-series 12 Dates ‘Til Christmas, as well as opposite Siân Phillips in Summer 1954, a pair of Terence Rattigan one-act plays. Other recent credits include Alma Mater at the Almeida Theatre, Ragdoll at Jermyn Street Theatre, Rock and Roll at Hampstead, and The Last Duel on screen, playing Sir Robert de Thibouville opposite Ridley Scott’s direction.

What made you want to take on this role, especially given it’s your first musical?

Nathaniel: I am ridiculously excited, to be honest. I find it such a thrill, and I’m amazed I’m getting a chance to do this at my age. I’d pretty much accepted I’d never do a musical. I always believed in musicals — not the flashy, showy ones with all the razzmatazz, I’m not so good at that — but I grew up watching Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra, and I always thought it was perfectly natural to take your girlfriend to a bandstand in the park and sing and dance with her. Particularly Fred Astaire, because he looked like my granddad. I’ve been waiting to do it all my life, and finally I’m doing it — finally I can burst into song rather than just say things!

Julie Andrews remains so closely tied to this show — what has it been like working alongside her on this production?

Nathaniel: I’ve been very lucky in my time and worked with some true greats. Unfortunately, when I say worked with, there’s often been a brush past the greatness rather than proper time together. I flatter myself my first film was with Olivier, and it was his last and my first — we only did a tiny little bit together. With Julie, I’ve only met her on Zoom, and she’s not going to be in rehearsals, unfortunately. So I’ve been very lucky in my career, and Julie’s right up there with them — she’s a real icon, whether it’s My Fair Lady, which I only ever saw as the film, with Audrey Hepburn, who I adore, or Mary Poppins, or Maria in The Sound of Music. Just incredible.

Henry Higgins has been played many times before you. How does your take on the character compare, and how do you approach playing someone with such dated views on women in a post-#MeToo world?

Nathaniel: I get the sense we’re going to be slightly different. I think since they did it ten years ago, two major factors have changed how I’d approach Higgins now: we’ve had COVID, so there’s a different tolerance in an audience now — and Me Too has happened. When you’re playing a character as sexist as Henry Higgins — is there anybody else who’s been written that sexist? I don’t think Higgins is a misogynist, though, which I think is my key. As soon as I got the role, my friends were going, “Oh my God, he’s such a misogynist,” and my wife and her friends said they’d come and throw slippers at me. But I had to disagree. I don’t think misogyny is about hating women. I don’t think he hates women at all — I just don’t think he understands them. He doesn’t have a clue what goes where and why, and I don’t just mean physically — mentally, he doesn’t understand that women are, broadly, the more empathetic of the two sexes. They have a deeper understanding when it comes to being protective, or to sacrifice. We think of males and sacrifice as dying on your sword on the battlefield, fighting for queen and country, protecting your family — and actually women just go, “well, I’ve had to sacrifice my life and career for you to do your thing for so long.” It’s a very different kind of thing, and I think we’re more alive to that now than we ever were, and to calling people out. If you wrote this now, you wouldn’t get away with it. What I’ve really enjoyed doing is trying to rationalise why he says these extraordinary things. My key is that he falls in love very early on but just does not know it. It’s a completely alien feeling and he can’t recognise it. I don’t think the audience see this at all — it’s not for them to see, it’s just his inner story. That’s given me the route so that when I come to a song like “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man” — he gets to that peak of sexism, but because he doesn’t understand the turmoil she’s created inside him. That way I hope there’s a way to lance the boil a bit inside.

You’ve spent much of your career performing Shakespeare. Has that experience with verse and rhythm helped you approach the music in this show?

Nathaniel: That’s a very good point. There’s lots of Shakespeare that isn’t written in verse, and that’s fine — nowadays you’ve had actors doing “to be or not to be, that is the question” without using the iambic pentameter. But on the other hand, if you use the iambic, it actually takes you to the next line — that’s the point, that’s why it’s there. Either way is valid, and today’s ear often prefers not the iambic. But this is something I’ve never done before. When Rex Harrison did it, he sort of brushed past the notes as he spoke his lines rather than singing them — everybody expects me to do that. But what’s been fun with my wonderful teacher in London is adhering to the notes as much as possible. If I do that, does it take me to a slightly different meaning? It does, because it hits an emphasis in a way I wouldn’t if I was speaking it. I’m allowing the music to take me to a place I’m not expecting, and I’m loving that challenge — it’s absolutely thrilling.

Henry goes into the story determined to change Eliza — but do you think, by the end, she’s actually changed him more than he’s changed her?

Nathaniel: Yeah — he knows what’s happening, there’s a bet for her. But for him, you don’t realise it. I think the joy of it is that last song, so beautifully written, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” I sang it the other day with my singing teacher in London and was sobbing at the end of it, it’s just so beautiful. I hope I’m not going to be like that every night — I’m a pushover, with my goldfish acting I’ll probably be sobbing every single night. But it’s a joy.

For anyone who’s never encountered My Fair Lady or Pygmalion before, what would you say to convince them to come and see the show?

Nathaniel: Oh, what a very good question. I’d say — if you don’t mind the long words — it’s the metamorphosis of two people, one who intends to change and one who doesn’t. The excitement is the twist in the tale when you realise it’s not just the girl who’s changing. Someone asked me earlier who I think changes more, Eliza or Henry, and it’s a really interesting question — I don’t quite know how to answer it. You come to see the change of two people, one expecting and wanting to be changed, and the other not realising it’s happening.

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My Fair Lady opens at the Sydney Opera House this week, and continues on to Melbourne’s State Theatre from November.

For tickets and more information, visit myfairladythemusical.com.au

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Header image by Matt Crockett