| Name |
Marni Nixon |
| Height |
|
| Naionality |
American |
| Date of Birth |
22-February-1930 |
| Place of Birth |
Altadena, California, U.S. |
| Famous for |
Acting |
Marni Nixon is an American soprano and playback singer for featured actresses in movie musicals. She has also spent much of her career performing in concerts with major symphony orchestras around the world and in operas and musicals throughout the United States.
Nixon's career on film started in 1948 when she sang the voices of the angels heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948). The next year, she did her first dubbing work when she sang Margaret O'Brien's singing voice in 1949's The Secret Garden. And when Marilyn Monroe sang those high notes in Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), it was actually Nixon's voice the audience heard. In 1956 she worked closely with Deborah Kerr doing the star's singing voice for the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I and again the next year she worked with Kerr dubbing An Affair to Remember.
In 1961's West Side Story, the studio kept her work on the film (as the singing voice of Natalie Wood's Maria) a secret from the actress and Nixon even dubbed Rita Moreno's singing in the film's number "Tonight". She asked the film's producers for, but did not receive, any direct royalties from her work on the film, but Leonard Bernstein contractually gave her 1/2 of one percent of his personal royalties from it. For My Fair Lady in 1964, she again worked with the female lead of the film, Audrey Hepburn, to perform the songs of Hepburn's character Eliza. Because of her dubbing work for non-singing actresses in musical films, in some circles she became known as "The Ghostess with the Mostest". Nixon made a special guest appearance on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts broadcast that aired April 9, 1961, entitled "Folk Music in the Concert Hall." She sang three "Songs of the Auvergne" by Canteloube.
