1. Michael Holroyd in his biography of Shaw brings out the tortured nature of Shaw’s relationship with his mother, whom he loved but who showed no love for him. She had a strong antipathy to all men, particularly her husband. The one exception was her music teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, who shared the family home in Dublin, taught Mrs Shaw to sing and may well have been her lover. Shaw, according to Holroyd, based Eliza loosely on his mother and Higgins on the teacher who had moulded her into a singer, much as Pygmalion had moulded and brought Galatea to life in the original Greek myth.

2. In fact we learn from a later film in Lucas’s Star Wars sequence that, although not his mother, Leia is the next best thing, as Luke’s older sister! I have here treated the original Star Wars as a story standing alone in its own right, as was intended when it first appeared. But in the succession of sequels and ‘prequels’ Lucas was inspired by its success to produce over the following decades, he continued to play around extensively with the archetypal figures who appeared in the 1977 version, to the point where we eventually learn that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. As a young man, Vader had been one of the bravest of the Jedi Knights and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s closest friend. But he had then switched to the side of darkness, like other ‘fallen angels’ in the history of storytelling, from Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost to Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. In archetypal terms there is nothing odd about this since, even in the original movie, Luke’s relationship to the ‘Dark Lord’ is entirely consistent with that of a Son-Hero to a Dark Father-figure.