Pygmalion is a play written by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1912, named after the Greek mythological figure. It was first presented onstage in German translation, premiering at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913. Its English-language premiere took place at His Majesty's Theatre in London's West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle.

Pygmalion became the playwright's most popular play, enduring in popular culture as the heavily adapted and romanticized My Fair Lady (1956 musical and 1964 film).

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the musical Adonis and the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.

Eliza Doolittle was inspired by Kitty Wilson, owner of a flower stall at Norfolk Street, Strand, in London. Wilson continued selling flowers at the stall until September 1958. Her daughter, Betty Benton, then took over, but was forced to close down a month later when the City of London decreed that the corner was no longer "designated" for street trading.

Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito Pagliardini, but above all the cantankerous Henry Sweet.

Shaw is also very likely to have known the life story of Jacob Henle, a professor at Heidelberg University, who fell in love with Elise Egloff [de], a Swiss housemaid, forcing her through several years of bourgeois education to turn her into an adequate wife. Egloff died shortly after their marriage. Her story inspired various literary works, including a play by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and a novella by Gottfried Keller, comparing Henle with the Greek Pygmalion.

Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premièred at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translation by Shaw's Viennese literary agent and acolyte, Siegfried Trebitsch.

Its first New York production opened on 24 March 1914 at the German-language Irving Place Theatre starring Hansi Arnstaedt as Eliza. It opened in London on 11 April 1914, at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's His Majesty's Theatre, with Campbell as Eliza and Tree as Higgins, and ran for 118 performances. Shaw directed the actors through tempestuous rehearsals, often punctuated by at least one of the two storming out of the theatre in a rage.