Marni Nixon
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Marni Nixon (born February 22, 1930) is an American singer whose renown for dubbing the singing voices of featured actresses in well known movies earned her the sobriquet "The Ghostess with the Mostess", and also "The Voice of Hollywood".
She was born Margaret McEathron in Altadena, California and began singing at a young age in choruses.
Nixon's dubbing career includes:
- The voices of the angels heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948)
- The singing voice of Margaret O'Brien in The Secret Garden (1949)
- Providing Marilyn Monroe with a few top notes in her performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (1953)
- The singing voice for Deborah Kerr in the Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I (1956) (on some tracks of the film, Kerr's and Nixon's voices were skillfully intertwined)
- The singing voice for Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember (1957)
- The singing voice for Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story (1961) and also sang some parts of the score of Anita played by Rita Moreno, sharing the load with co-dubber Betty Wand and Moreno herself. In parts of the song "Quintet", she sings both Maria and Anita's lines.
- The singing voice for Audrey Hepburn as Liza in My Fair Lady (1964), for which Nixon gained much notoriety, as news-eager journalists ripped apart the customary veil of secrecy. This fact is said to be the cause of Hepburn failing even to get nominated for an Academy Award for the demanding role.
Nixon finally appeared on the screen, singing for herself in the film of The Sound of Music as part of the chorus of nuns. Julie Andrews lost the role of Eliza Doolittle to Hepburn, but won the Oscar for Mary Poppins. When they first met on the set of The Sound of Music, she greeted Nixon with a hearty handshake and the line: "I really love your work!" In fact, they had already been co-workers on a song, as Nixon voiced one of the trio of geese in the animated "Jolly Holiday" sequence of Mary Poppins.
The credits for her many dubbing roles did not appear on the titles of any of the films, and Nixon did not begin to be fully credited or widely acknowledged until the movies' subsequent release on VHS decades later.
When Hollywood musicals gave her less work, she started to perform on stage, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she hosted a children's television show in Seattle on KOMO channel 4 called Boomerang. In the 1990s, she lent her voice to the Disney animated feature Mulan and replaced Joan Roberts as Heidi Schiller in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.
In her own name, she has also recorded songs of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern.
One of her three husbands, Ernest Gold, composed the theme song to the movie Exodus. They had three children together, one of whom is the singer and songwriter Andrew Gold ("Lonely Boy" and "Thank You For Being a Friend").
[edit] References
- Nixon, Marni, with Cole, Stephen. I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story. New York, Billboard Books. 2006. ISBN 0-8230-8365-9.
