Marni Nixon, the Singing Voice Behind the Screen, Dies at 86
She was not on the list.
The cause was breast cancer, said Randy Banner, a student
and friend. Ms. Nixon, a California native, had lived in Manhattan, on the
Upper West Side, for more than 40 years.
Classically trained, Ms. Nixon was throughout the 1950s and
’60s the unseen — and usually uncredited — singing voice of the stars in a
spate of celebrated Hollywood films. She dubbed Deborah Kerr in “The King and
I,” Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady,”
among many others.
Her other covert outings included singing for Jeanne Crain
in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” Janet Leigh in “Pepe” and Ida Lupino in “Jennifer.”
“The ghostess with the mostest,” the newspapers called her, a description that
eventually began to rankle.
Before her Hollywood days and long afterward, Ms. Nixon was
an acclaimed concert singer, a specialist in contemporary music who appeared as
a soloist with the New York Philharmonic; a recitalist at Carnegie, Alice Tully
and Town Halls in New York; and a featured singer on one of Leonard Bernstein’s
televised young people’s concerts.
Her concerts and her many recordings — including works by
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Ives, Copland, Gershwin and Kern — drew wide
critical praise. Yet as late as 1990, decades after Ms. Nixon had made good on
her vow to perform only as herself, she remained, in the words of The Los
Angeles Times, “the best known of the ghost singers.”
At midcentury, Hollywood was more inclined to cast bankable
stars than trained singers in films that called for singing. As a result,
generations of Americans have grown accustomed to Ms. Nixon’s voice, if not her
face, in standards like “Getting to Know You,” from “The King and I”; “I Feel
Pretty,” from “West Side Story”; and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” from “My
Fair Lady.”
Ms. Kerr was nominated for an Academy Award in 1956 for her
role as Anna in “The King and I”; the film’s soundtrack album sold hundreds of
thousands of copies. For singing Anna’s part on that album, Ms. Nixon recalled,
she received a total of $420.
“You always had to
sign a contract that nothing would be revealed,” Ms. Nixon told the ABC News
program “Nightline” in 2007. “Twentieth Century Fox, when I did ‘The King and
I,’ threatened me.” She continued, “They said, if anybody ever knows that you
did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we’ll see to it that you don’t
work in town again.”
Though Ms. Nixon honored the bargain, her work soon became
one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets. She became something of a cult figure,
appearing as a guest on “To Tell the Truth” and as an answer to clues featured
by “Jeopardy!,” Trivial Pursuit and at least one New York Times crossword
puzzle.
Her increasing renown helped bring her spectral trade into
the light and encouraged her to push for official recognition. “The anonymity
didn’t bother me until I sang Natalie Wood’s songs in ‘West Side Story,’ ” Ms.
Nixon told The Times in 1967. “Then I saw how important my singing was to the
picture. I was giving my talent, and somebody else was taking the credit.”
Although the studios seldom accorded Ms. Nixon the screen
credit and royalties that she began to demand, both became customary for ghost
singers.
Starting as a teenager in the late 1940s and continuing for
the next two decades, Ms. Nixon lent her crystalline soprano to some 50 films,
sometimes contributing just a line or two of song — sometimes just a single,
seamless note — that the actress could not manage on her own.
The voice of an angel heard by Ingrid Bergman in “Joan of
Arc”? It was Ms. Nixon’s.
The songs of the nightclub singer, played by Ms. Kerr, in
“An Affair to Remember”? Also Ms. Nixon.
The second line of the couplet “But square-cut or
pear-shape/These rocks don’t lose their shape,” with its pinpoint high note on
“their,” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”? That was Ms. Nixon too. (The film’s
star Marilyn Monroe sang most of the rest of the number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s
Best Friend.”)
It was a decidedly peculiar calling — and not one on which
Ms. Nixon had ever planned — entailing not so much imitating actors as
embodying them.
“It’s fascinating, getting inside the actresses you’re
singing for,” she told The New York Journal-American in 1964. “It’s like
cutting off the top of their heads and seeing what’s underneath. You have to
know how they feel, as well as how they talk, in order to sing as they would
sing — if they could sing.”
Marni Nixon and Dick Latessa in the Encores! production of
the musical “Music in the Air” at City Center in 2009. Credit Sara Krulwich/The
New York Times
Over time, however, Ms. Nixon came to regard her spectacular
mimetic gift as more curse than blessing. For despite her myriad
accomplishments as a singer of art songs, she was obliged to spend years
exorcising her ghostly cinematic presence.
“It got so I’d lent my voice to so many others that I felt
it no longer belonged to me,” she told The Times in 1981. “It was eerie; I had
lost part of myself.”
A petite, fine-boned woman who resembled Julie Andrews, Ms.
Nixon was born Margaret Nixon McEathron on Feb. 22, 1930, in Altadena, Calif.,
near Los Angeles.
She began studying the violin at 4 and throughout her
childhood played bit parts — “the freckle-faced brat,” she called her typical
role — in a string of Hollywood movies. At 11, already possessed of a fine
singing voice, she won a vocal competition at the Los Angeles County Fair and
found her true calling. She became a private pupil of Vera Schwarz, a
distinguished Austrian soprano who had settled in the United States.
At 17, Ms. Nixon appeared as a vocal soloist with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski, singing in Orff’s “Carmina
Burana.” She later studied opera at Tanglewood with Sarah Caldwell and Boris
Goldovsky.
During her teenage years, Ms. Nixon worked as a messenger at
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Knowing of her musical ability — she had perfect pitch and
was an impeccable sight reader — the studio began recruiting her to furnish the
singing voices of young actresses. The work helped pay for Ms. Nixon’s voice
lessons.
Her first significant dubbing job was singing a Hindu
lullaby for Margaret O’Brien in “The Secret Garden,” released in 1949.
Ms. Nixon did occasionally take center stage, as when she
played Eliza Doolittle in a 1964 revival of “My Fair Lady” at City Center in
New York. (Ms. Andrews had played the part in the original Broadway production,
which opened in 1956.) In 1965, Ms. Nixon was seen on camera in a small role as
a singing nun in “The Sound of Music,” starring Ms. Andrews.
On Broadway, Ms. Nixon appeared in the Sigmund Romberg
musical “The Girl in Pink Tights” in 1954 and, more recently, in the musical
drama “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ ” (2000), the 2001 revival of Stephen
Sondheim’s “Follies” and the 2003 revival of “Nine.”
Ms. Nixon’s first marriage, to Ernest Gold, a film composer
who won an Oscar for the 1960 film “Exodus,” ended in divorce, as did her
second, to Lajos Frederick Fenster. Her third husband, Albert Block, died in
2015.
Survivors include her daughters from her first marriage,
Martha Carr and Melani Gold Friedman; her sisters Donyl Mern Aleman, Adair
McEathron Jenkins and Ariel Lea Witbeck; six grandchildren; and three
great-grandchildren. A son from her first marriage, Andrew Gold, a popular
songwriter whose hit “Thank You for Being a Friend” became the theme of the NBC
sitcom “The Golden Girls,” died in 2011 at 59.
Ms. Nixon’s other onscreen credits include “Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit.” In the 1970s and ’80s, she was the host of “Boomerang,”
a popular children’s television show in Seattle, where she had made her home
for some years before moving to Manhattan.
She also supplied the singing voice of Grandmother Fa in
Disney’s animated film “Mulan,” released in 1998. (The character’s spoken
dialogue was voiced by the actress June Foray.) She taught for many years at
the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where she was the founding
director of the vocal department.
But it was her work as a ghost that is enshrined forever in
the cinematic canon: “West Side Story” won the Oscar for best picture of 1961;
“My Fair Lady” won for 1964. Both films remain perennials on television.
Ms. Nixon, who continued singing until she was in her 80s,
eventually came to regard her heard-but-not-seen life with affection. She paid
it homage in a one-woman show, “Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood,” with
which she toured the country for years.
She did likewise in a memoir, “I Could Have Sung All Night,”
published in 2006. (The memoir was written with a ghost, Stephen Cole, whom Ms.
Nixon credited prominently on the cover and the title page.)
In the few movie musicals made today, directors tend to cast
actors who are trained singers (like Meryl Streep in “Into the Woods”) or those
whose star power mitigates the fact that they are not (like Helena Bonham
Carter in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”).
What this means is that the ghost singers who were once a
Hollywood mainstay have now, for the most part, become ghosts themselves.
Filmography
Film
Year Title Role Notes
1942 The Bashful
Bachelor Angela Abernathy
1950 Cinderella Narrator (vocals) Song: "Cinderella"
(uncredited)
1951 Alice in
Wonderland Singing Flowers (vocals) Uncredited
1953 Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes Lorelei Lee
(vocals) Diamonds Are a Girl's
Best Friend [high notes] (uncredited)
1956 The King and
I Anna Leonowens (vocals) 4 songs (uncredited)
1956 Dance with
Me, Henry Vocals Song: "Libiamo ne' lieti calici"
1957 An Affair to
Remember Terry McKay (vocals) 3 songs (uncredited)
1961 West Side
Story Maria Nunez (vocals)
7 songs (uncredited)
1964 Mary Poppins Geese (vocals) Uncredited
1964 My Fair Lady Eliza Doolittle (vocals) 10 songs (uncredited)
1965 The Sound of
Music Sister Sophia Song: "Maria"
1997 I Think I Do Aunt Alice
1998 Mulan Grandmother Fa (vocals) Song: "Honor to Us All"
(uncredited)
Television
Year Title Role Notes
1967 Jack and the
Beanstalk Princess Serena (vocals) Telefilm; various songs
1969 The
Mothers-in-Law Herself Episode: "The Not-So-Grand Opera"
1977–1981 Boomerang
Herself KOMO-TV, Seattle
1984 Taking My
Turn Edna Movie
2001 Law &
Order: Special Victims Unit Edna
Dumas Episode:
"Redemption"
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