age limits

Another thing about the Laura Benanti concert: she commented that she'd turned 40 while playing Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and seemed to feel as if she'd gotten in just under the wire, that 40 was considered the age limit for the part.

That's interesting, I thought, because Mrs Patrick Campbell (as she was billed), the actress for whom Shaw wrote the original role in Pygmalion, was 49 when she created it on stage. How long she kept on playing it I don't know, but I did find a reference to her still doing it six years later, so when she was 55.

As Benanti would say, there's a lot to unpack here.