Alan Jay Lerner

With Loewe he turned Shaw's Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, keeping the social bite while giving Higgins and Eliza numbers built around character and speech. Songs such as Almost Like Being in Love, They Call the Wind Maria, I Could Have Danced All Night and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever left the theatre and settled into the jazz and popular repertoire heard on later recordings. He also worked with Burton Lane and others, and wrote the screenplay for An American in Paris. Lerner often spent months on a lyric, rewriting until rhyme and stress sat comfortably in a performer's mouth rather than forcing a tidy line on the page.