Marni Nixon an accomplished concert singer whose claim to fame was that she was the ‘voice’ who performed for major Hollywood movie stars who appeared in musicals even though they couldn’t sing a note, died on Sunday in NY aged 86 years old.
One of Marni’s most famous roles was dubbing for Deborah Kerr in The King & I who was then nominated for an Academy Award for her role in 1956, and even though the film’s soundtrack album sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Marni got paid just $420 for all her efforts. She was also Audrey Hepburn’s ‘voice’ in My Fair Lady, and Natalie Wood’s ‘voice’ in West Side Story (although the Studio kept that fact from a temperamental Miss Wood). In fact Marni also replaced Rita Moreno in the Tonight quintet from the sane movie, for which Miss Moreno won her only Oscar. Although Universal Pictures refused to acknowledge or even pay Marni fairly for her uncredited role in West Side Story, composer Leonard Bernstein contractually gave her 1/4 of one percent of his personal royalties.
She also had her own career too appearing in small parts in movies like as a singing nun in The Sound of Music, she also sang with the Los Angeles Opera, and even occasionally taking center stage when Broadway musicals were revived. But as she told The Times in 1981 “It got so I’d lent my voice to so many others that I felt it no longer belonged to me. it was eerie; I had lost part of myself.”
Her remarkable talent for mimicry, and the roles she played, eventually became one of Hollywood’s worst kept secrets, but when Marni actually did the dubbing in order to pay for her own singing lessons, the powerful Studios threatened that she would never ever work again if she ever revealed. When it did become public knowledge decades later she paid it homage in a one-woman show, “Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood,” with which she toured the country for years right up into her 80’s .
Here then is Marnie Nixon singing both Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno’s parts in the Tonight Quintet from West Side Story.
