Marni Nixon

Musical theater historian Kurt Gänzl bestowed the title “queen of the dubbers” on soprano Marni Nixon, whose long professional life spanned film, opera, television, recordings, and Broadway, although audiences recognized her sound far more readily than her features or her name. Her standing among fellow singers derived from a string of 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s screen musicals in which she functioned as an uncredited “ghost singer,” supplying vocals for non-singing stars that included Margaret O’Brien, Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood, and Audrey Hepburn. Consequently, countless theatergoers and purchasers of soundtrack LPs for productions such as The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady absorbed her performances without realizing whose voice they heard. The lack of screen credit at the time contributed to this anonymity, yet her chameleon-like adaptability also played a decisive role, enabling her, as Gänzl observed, to portray convincingly “the very English” Anna Leonowens, the “Puerto Rican teenager” Maria, and “the cockney Eliza.” That same flexibility surfaced in other arenas, evidenced by Grammy nominations for her classical discs and her stint hosting a children’s television program.

Born Margaret Nixon McEathron in Altadena, California, on February 22, 1930, she began as a child actress and soloist with the Roger Wagner Chorale while pursuing rigorous classical training. Her teachers included Carl Ebert at the University of Southern California, Jan Popper at Stanford University, and Sarah Caldwell together with Boris Goldovsky at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood. At eighteen she accepted her initial ghost-singing assignment, voicing child star Margaret O’Brien in the May 1948 musical The Big City and supplying an off-screen vocal for the November release Joan of Arc. The next year she again sang for O’Brien in The Secret Garden. In 1950 she married composer Ernest Gold; the union endured until 1969 and produced three children, one of whom became the recording artist Andrew Gold.

Although Marilyn Monroe performed most of her own vocals in the July 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Nixon supplied the highest notes, demonstrating her skill at matching timbre so precisely that the composite sounded like a single singer. She appeared as a guest on the short-lived Dumont series Opera Cameos in 1954. Studio records indicate she was engaged to perform “If I Loved You” for Shirley Jones in the February 1956 film Carousel, though Nixon later recalled no such session and Jones herself possessed a strong singing voice. Her subsequent, undisputed contribution came in the June 1956 Rodgers & Hammerstein adaptation The King and I, where she voiced Deborah Kerr on standards including “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” and “Shall We Dance?” Capitol Records’ soundtrack album reached number one, lingered on the charts more than five years, and earned gold certification after reportedly selling over a million copies. Gänzl later wrote in The Blackwell Guide to Musical Theatre on Record that “Nixon was a splendidly assured and tuneful voice-of-Anna,” imparting “just the kind of warmth they needed with oversinging.” The July 1957 romantic drama An Affair to Remember was not a musical, yet Nixon again supplied Kerr’s singing; Columbia Records issued the accompanying album. Two months earlier she had dubbed Sophia Loren for the Decca soundtrack of Boy on a Dolphin.

Nixon made her first adult on-screen appearance in March 1960 as a chorister in the film Can-Can. In October 1961 she assumed the role of Maria for Natalie Wood in the screen version of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story, singing “Tonight,” “Somewhere,” “I Have a Love,” and “I Feel Pretty.” Gänzl praised her “usual amazing job” and the “lightness and sweetness which fits the role delightfully.” Columbia’s soundtrack album held the top position for more than a year and sold three million copies. In November 1962 she again replaced Wood for the Warner Bros. release Gypsy, a Top Ten LP. That same month she began a Disney affiliation by appearing on the Disneyland Records album Great Operatic Composers and Their Stories.

During 1964 her projects overlapped with the rising film career of Julie Andrews. Although Andrews had originated Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, the studio cast Audrey Hepburn for the October 1964 film My Fair Lady; Hepburn could not sing, so Nixon supplied her voice on “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “Just You Wait,” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Before the picture opened, Nixon made her Broadway debut in a limited New York City Center revival that ran from May 20 to June 28. In May, Disneyland Records issued Ten Songs from Mary Poppins, featuring Nixon alongside Richard M. Sherman on “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The September release of Mary Poppins starred Andrews, who performed her own vocals. Nixon also appeared that month on Disneyland’s The Story of Hansel and Gretel and, in January 1965, on Famous Arias from Aida (And Other Operas). The My Fair Lady soundtrack reached number four, remained on the charts more than two years, and achieved gold status.

Nixon next shared the screen with Andrews in the March 1965 film The Sound of Music, cast as Sister Sophia in the ensemble number “Maria.” After that production she stepped away from motion pictures yet remained active elsewhere. On February 26, 1967, she supplied both singing and speaking voices for an animated Jack and the Beanstalk broadcast on NBC, produced and directed by Gene Kelly with songs by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn; Hanna-Barbera Records released the soundtrack. In 1976 RCA issued 9 Early Songs: The Cabaret Songs of Arnold Schoenberg, earning her a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Performance, Vocal Soloist. She returned to the stage in the off-Broadway musical Taking My Turn on June 9, 1983, performing alongside Margaret Whiting and Cissy Houston; the show completed 345 performances and yielded a Broadway Ltd. cast album.

Reference Recordings released Marni Nixon Sings Gershwin in 1985 and Marni Nixon Sings Classic Kern three years later, both with pianist Lincoln Mayorga. In 1987 she received another Grammy nomination, this time for Copland: 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson on Reference Recordings. She appeared in several stagings of the musical Opal and recorded its 1996 studio cast album. On screen she played a role in the 1997 film I Think I Do and supplied a voice for the 1998 Disney animated feature Mulan. She returned to Broadway on January 11, 2000, in the musical adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, which ran 112 performances through April 16. In 2002 she joined the cast of a Follies revival; the following year she replaced a cast member in a revival of Nine. She continued performing into the mid-2000s, appearing, for example, in a 2005 Barrington Stage Company production of Follies after passing her seventy-fifth birthday.

Nixon also sang in opera houses, taking roles in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Verdi’s La Traviata and Rigoletto, Offenbach’s La Périchole, and contemporary works such as Peter Maxwell Davies’ Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, which she recorded for the Musical Heritage Society, and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine. She performed as soloist with orchestras throughout the United States and abroad and toured her one-woman program Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood. She taught at the California Institute of the Arts from 1969 to 1971 and at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara beginning in 1980. While living in Seattle she starred in her own children’s series, Boomerang. Marni Nixon died in Manhattan in July 2016 at the age of 86.