The American soprano, heard in the films The King and I, West Side Story and My Fair Lady, has passed away aged 86.

American Soprano Marni Nixon, best known for her ghost-singing in Hollywood films has died of breast cancer, aged 86. Nicknamed “The Ghostesss with the Mostest” by Time Magazine, she dubbed the voice of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. It is also her voice in the film West Side Story, singing Natalie Woods’ Maria. Classically trained, she remained mostly behind the scenes until she was outed by Deborah Kerr, who credited her work in an interview.

Born in California in 1930, Nixon began her musical training on the violin before switching to singing. She dubbed her first film in 1947 and made her debut at the Hollywood Bowl singing Orff’s Carmina Burana. While she is best-known for her behind-the-scenes work in film – you can also hear her voice in Joan of Arc and An Affair to Remember – she studied opera at Tanglewood with Sarah Caldwell and Boris Goldovsky. She played Eliza Doolittle in a 1964 production of My Fair Lady at City Center in New York and had a small role as one of the singing nuns in The Sound of Music.

Nixon appeared on Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts and went on to sing as a soloist with orchestras all over the world – including the London Symphony, New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic orchestras. She performed in operas for companies such as San Francisco Opera and Los Angeles Opera and recorded a series of albums under her own name – including recordings of works by Webern, Schoenberg, Copland and Gershwin. She also provided the singing voice for Grandmother Fa in Disney’s 1998 film, Mulan. Between 1950 and 1968 she was married to composer Ernest Gold, and their son Andrew Gold has made a career as a singer-songwriter.

Singing into her 80s, she looked back her career in a one-woman show, Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood and in her memoire I Could Have Sung All Night.

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