Marni Nixon

Margaret Nixon McEathron (February 22, 1930 – July 24, 2016), known professionally as Marni Nixon, was an American soprano and ghost singer for featured actresses in movie musicals. She is now well known as the real singing voices of the leading actresses in films, including The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady, although this was concealed at the time from audiences.

Besides her voice work in films, Nixon's varied career included some film roles of her own, television, opera, musicals on Broadway and elsewhere throughout the United States, concerts with major symphony orchestras, and recordings.

Born in Altadena, California to Charles Nixon and Margaret Elsa (née Wittke) McEathron, Nixon was a child film actress who also played the violin and began singing at an early age in choruses, including performing solos with the Roger Wagner Chorale. She went on to study singing and opera with, among others, Vera Schwarz, Carl Ebert, Boris Goldovsky and Sarah Caldwell. In 1947, having adopted the stage name Marni Nixon, she made her Hollywood Bowl solo debut in Carmina Burana with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Nixon's career in film started in 1948 when she sang the voices of the angels heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948). The same year, she did her first dubbing work when she provided Margaret O'Brien's singing voice in 1948's Big City and then 1949's The Secret Garden. She sang for Jeanne Crain in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and dubbed Marilyn Monroe's high notes in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Also in 1953, she sang for Ida Lupino in Jennifer. Nixon appeared on Broadway in 1954 in The Girl in Pink Tights.