My Fair Lady 60th anniversary staging has Tony Llewellyn-Jones as Pickering

Tony Llewellyn-Jones, who is playing Colonel Hugh Pickering in the 60th anniversary production of My Fair Lady, has long-running links to the national capital.

"Canberra has a big chunk of my heart – I love it," he says.

He once shook Sir Robert Menzies' hand during a school trip to what is now Old Parliament House, got Gough Whitlam's autograph, and sang a song in a revue at the ANU Arts Centre back in 1980 while at the Australian National University studying an arts degree. He's hoping that the vocal talents he displayed back then will get him through the big number he shares, The Rain In Spain.

The Lerner and Loewe musical is directed by Dame Julie Andrews, who played Eliza Doolittle in the show's 1956 Broadway premiere and then in its first London season. In keeping with the links to the past, the sets are designed after the original ones by Oliver Smith and the costumes are replicas of the Cecil Beaton designs in that Broadway premiere (though there are radio mikes now, which certainly weren't in use in the 1950s).

But Llewellyn-Jones says Andrews, while a strict leader and dedicated to the task at hand – her early instructions to the cast included "know your lines" and "don't be late" – is aware that the cast need the freedom to give their own interpretation of roles in a show she is better acquainted with than most, and with which many people are intimately familiar, too.

"Dame Julie knows it backwards and most people feel they know it and are about one step ahead of you anyway."

But he's not daunted and his memories of My Fair Lady go back a long way, too.

"I was brought up in part in Malaya and I will never forget my parents coming back from having seen it in London – they came back with the long-playing record and played it all the time in the late 1950s."

Based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, My Fair Lady is set in Edwardian England. It tells the story of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (played by Anna O'Byrne) who wants to speak like a lady so she can work in a florist's shop and the phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Alex Jennings) who makes a bet with linguist Colonel Pickering that he can teach her to do just that. But it's more of a challenge than he expected.

"Pickering is a semi-retired Indian army officer who's an expert in subcontinental languages," Llewellyn-Jones says. He's come to London to find Higgins, renowned for his expertise in dialects and pronunciation, and is invited to stay with him. Their interest is piqued by the case of Eliza Doolittle and the bet – for the expenses of the experiment – is made between the two "confirmed bachelors". But while Pickering treats Eliza in a more gentlemanly fashion than the offhand (to put it mildly) and overtly chauvinistic Higgins, her relationship with both is complicated and plays out to a Lerner and Loewe score that includes the songs I Could Have Danced All Night, On The Street Where You Live and I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face.

The cast includes Victorian College of the Arts graduate Anna O'Byrne as Eliza – "She was in Guys and Dolls when Dame Julie saw her and thought she was the one" – British actor Alex Jennings as Higgins, and another Australian stage veteran, Reg Livermore, a former Higgins himself, as Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's dustman father, as well as another showbiz veteran, Robyn Nevin, as Mrs Higgins.

Llewellyn-Jones, while London-born himself, is a long-time Australian resident. After a brief fling with English, history and sociology at the University of New England in the late 1960s ("I was too young," he says), he auditioned successfully for the National Institute of Dramatic Art and graduated in 1971. From there, he joined the Melbourne Theatre Company, appearing in many productions over the next couple of years and gaining a wide range of experience, including – just to name a few of the many shows in which he appeared – Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30 and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

But he wanted to honour his parents' expectations for his education – hence that ANU degree, where he learned about politics and Aboriginal issues ("which I will never forget") and art from Sasha Grishin (going to the National Gallery of Australia for tutorials) – as well as continue his acting career, which has continued apace on stage and screen for more than four decades. It includes everything from All Saints to the Peter Weir movie Picnic At Hanging Rock to the Australian tour of the comedy Yes, Prime Minister, which came to Canberra. He's worked with many Australian theatre companies, including Bell Shakespeare, Nimrod and especially the Sydney Theatre Company. He's also come to Canberra to direct a couple of productions for the Canberra Repertory Society – "of which I'm very proud" – Proof and Room to Move.

Behind the scenes in cinema, he worked as a producer for the late filmmaker Paul Cox, including Man of Flowers, My First Wife, Cactus and Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.

"His death was very sad, much too early," Llewellyn-Jones says, adding that working with Cox was "one of my proudest achievements".

On the subject of bringing in overseas actors to appear in Australian shows, which has caused controversy in some quarters, Llewellyn-Jones is sanguine. He points out that it's been going on for a long time, saying that in the 1970s he had the opportunity to see many major British stars when they came over in productions, including Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson and Rex Harrison. He also points out that Australians benefit too, with many performers having the chance to work in Britain – including O'Byrne, who was performing there when she was seen by Andrews.

"We can't have it both ways."