Los
Angeles: On Sunday, American soprano and playback singer Margaret Nixon
McEathron, commonly known as Marni Nixon died of breast cancer at the age of
86.
The
singer appeared, uncredited, in many of the biggest movie musicals of all time —
dubbing the voices for Deborah Kerr in The
King and I, and Audrey Hepburn in My
Fair Lady.
She
also sang the high notes for Marilyn Monroe in Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend; and “ghosted” Natalie Wood's
vocals on West Side Story.
For
most of her career, the classically-trained musician remained unknown.
Twentieth Century Fox made her sign a contract saying she would never reveal
the ghost-singing on The King and I.
The story only came out later, when Kerr herself credited Nixon’s work in a
press interview.
The clandestine nature of her work led Time Magazine to
dub Nixon “the ghostess with the moistest”.
The
singer likened her work to that of a stuntman, and collaborated closely with
the stars to perfect the screen illusion.
Kerr “wanted to look like she was really singing” Nixon told
Washington Post “and wanted to be using the same muscles and the same stretches
you do in expressions”.
Born
in southern California, Margaret Nixon McEathron was an acclaimed musician both
before and after her work in Hollywood.
She
started playing violin at the age of four and began playing with Karl Moldrem’s
Hollywood Baby Orchestra six months later. At 11, she won a singing contest at
the LA County Fair and decided there and then to abandon the violin.
In
1947, the same year she dubbed her first film, she made her Hollywood Bowl solo
debut in Carmina Burana under the baton of Leopold Stokowski.
By
this stage, she had also dropped her “hard to pronounce” surname. “Kids at
school called me Mac-Earthworm,” she said.
Her
first job dubbing the voice of a film actress arrived when she was working in
the post room at MGM film studios, as a way of covering the cost of her singing
lessons. 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 singing voice in 1948’s Big City and then 1949’s The
Secret Garden.
Composer
Bronislaw Kaper, who was working on the score for the film The Secret Garden, stopped her in the corridor and challenged her
to sing a song in Hindi. The youngster obliged and her career was born.
But,
despite appearing on more than 50 soundtracks, she only sang on screen once —
as Sister Sophia, one of the nuns performing How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? in The Sound Of Music.
In
later years, Nixon appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic,
performed on Broadway and in opera houses and hosted the Emmy Award-winning
children’s television show Boomerang.
She
also taught at the California Institute of the Arts, and toured for many years
with Liberace.
Nixon
first had breast cancer in 1985, and wrote in her autobiography of the trauma
of appearing on Broadway as chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out when the
disease returned in 2000.
She
was married three times — first to Ernest Gold, the film composer behind Exodus and On The Beach, with whom she had a son, Andrew Gold, who went on to
compose the Golden Girls theme Thank You For Being A Friend.
Her
second marriage, to Lajos Frederick Fenster, ended in divorce, while her third
husband, Albert Block, died last year.
She is
survived by three sisters, two daughters from her first marriage, six
grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
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