“What about Gigi?” Leslie Caron asked MGM producer Arthur Freed in the early 1950s. They were on the soundstage of Lili, a surreal semi-musical about carnival performers, and Freed was worried that Caron’s character looked pedestrian on-screen, compared to her glamorous debut in An American in Paris, in 1951. Did she have another film in mind, one that could rescue her reputation? Caron pitched a few ideas before coming to Gigi, one of her favorite French novellas, which was written by Colette in 1944.

Freed paused. “Let me get back to you on that,” he said.

“It took him a year and a half to get back to me,” remembered Caron, now 86, during a recent telephone conversation, from her home in London—but he did, and she was right.

On its 60th anniversary, Gigi remains MGM’s most elegant musical—and maybe its most unlikely. Colette’s story, set around 1900, follows the youngest girl in a family of Parisian cocottes (courtesans) who is taught to manipulate men—and not to, under any circumstances, marry them. But Gigi, of course, ends up breaking the cocottes’s code and shattering social norms—even by today’s standards. The idea of a teenage girl from a family of courtesans marrying an older man still raises eyebrows, perhaps more so now than it did in the 50s—though MGM’s Technicolor treatment almost makes it possible to miss that this is what the story’s really about.

Arthur Freed hired Alan Jay Lerner to write the screenplay, using songs to smooth Colette’s edgy plot, and tapped Frederic Loewe for the music, who was also Lerner’s collaborator on My Fair Lady. While they planned the movie in Hollywood, Caron went to London in 1955 to star in a non-musical stage adaptation of Gigi, which Audrey Hepburn had opened on Broadway in ’51. To helm the production, Caron chose Tennessee Williams’s favored director, Peter Hall, who quickly became a favorite of hers as well. “We were very attracted, one to the other, but were extremely professional and didn’t go out together at all, until the opening night,” Caron said of Hall. “Then, that was it, on the opening night, we got together. That was it—until marriage, children, everything!”

She and Hall would marry, later that year. Caron was 25 and had already given birth to her first child—the producer Christopher Hall—by the time MGM was ready for her to portray 14-year-old Gigi.