Frank J. Prial, New York Times, 6 March, 2007
The role of Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Prof. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, requires an actress capable of expressing hauteur, exasperation and motherly concern, sometimes all at once. What it does not require is a singing voice, as it is among that classic musical’s few roles without a song.
So who has been cast in the New York Philharmonic’s concert-style revival at Lincoln Center this week?
None other than Marni Nixon, perhaps the most famous singing-voice-without-a-face in the history of motion pictures.
“I’d love to have a song in the show,” Ms. Nixon said during an interview in her West End Avenue apartment in New York. “I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’s Lament?’ But it isn’t going to happen, of course.”
Among her unseen roles were the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Margaret O’Brien in The Secret Garden — as well as, most famously, Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning screen version of My Fair Lady. Most recently, in 1998, she was the animated Grandmother Fa in Disney’s Mulan.
For her part, Ms. Nixon, 77, said she understood perfectly why the studio moguls chose to place famous faces in the starring roles and relegate her to the shadows.
“Hollywood wanted recognizable stars,” Ms. Nixon said. “And the fact that a lot of the stars couldn’t sing was only a minor inconvenience to the big producers.”
Her first dubbing job was for Miss O’Brien in The Secret Garden. Miss O’Brien, 12 at the time, was one of Hollywood’s top child stars. Ms. Nixon was 19.
Her first major job, she said, was singing the role of Anna in The King and I. “Deborah was tough to work with, but she was a complete professional,” Ms. Nixon said of Miss Kerr. “We worked on phrasing, we worked on interpretation, everything. It’s hard to believe now, but each number took a week.”
A dubber, Ms. Nixon explained, doesn’t simply substitute her voice for the actress’s voice. “The important thing is to sound as the actress would sound if she were doing the actual singing,” she said.
It being Hollywood, of course, sometimes the jobs verged on the ludicrous. Her work with Marilyn Monroe, for instance, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), consisted of just one phrase in one song — perhaps the musical’s most famous, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The phrase: “These rocks don’t lose their shape.”
If the studio bosses had had their way, Ms. Nixon said, she would have done more. “Actually, the studio wanted her entire voice dubbed,” she said. “They thought her voice was silly. I thought her voice suited her persona beautifully.”
In 1964, when Ms. Nixon was tapped to sing Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor’s screen version of My Fair Lady, one of her chief concerns was how the choice would sit with Julie Andrews, who had had great success with the role onstage but was passed over by Hollywood for the established star: Hepburn.
“I did the job,” Ms. Nixon said, “but I felt uneasy,” especially when she and Ms. Andrews later worked together in The Sound of Music.
The story is now part of Hollywood lore: Ms. Andrews came out ahead by starring in Disney’s Mary Poppins and winning the Oscar for best actress in the same year that “My Fair Lady” was released. [Ms. Nixon voiced the animated geese in "Jolly Holiday" in that film.]
Ms. Andrews seemed to harbor no grudges, Ms. Nixon said. When the two appeared in The Sound of Music, she said, Ms. Andrews made a point of seeking her out, shaking her hand and saying, “I like your work.” (Ms. Nixon played one of the nuns.)
When Ms. Nixon was cast as Eliza in a City Center revival of My Fair Lady, Ms. Andrews helped her overcome anxiety about handling the role.
Ms. Nixon received a modest reward for her highly praised dubbing work: stepping in front of the camera before millions of people as a presenter at the 1969 Academy Awards. The category? Best musical score.
Perhaps naturally, not all the people whose voices she dubbed were happy about it. When filming West Side Story, Wood refused to cooperate, and Ms. Nixon worked by herself on the musical numbers. It was not entirely Wood’s fault; the studio bosses were keeping her in the dark about Ms. Nixon’s true role.
“She thought I was there for backup and that she would be doing the entire picture,” Ms. Nixon said. “In fact, they didn’t like her singing, and, without telling her, proceeded to use my voice.”
And when Wood found out? “Well, she was enraged,” Ms. Nixon said. [Natalie Wood's vocals can be heard on the special edition DVD of West Side Story. The correct decision was made.]
Ms. Nixon will be surrounded by a high-wattage cast at this week’s Philharmonic staging of My Fair Lady, including Kelsey Grammer as Henry Higgins, Kelli O’Hara as Eliza Doolittle, Brian Dennehy as Alfred P. Doolittle and Charles Kimbrough as Col. Hugh Pickering. There will be four performances in Avery Fisher Hall, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Born in 1930 into a musical family in Southern California, Ms. Nixon started learning the violin at 4. Soon she had a singing act with her sisters. But young Marni had bigger plans. As a child she was an extra in dozens of films. As a teenager she joined the Roger Wagner Chorale (in which her best pal was another teenager, Marilyn Horne) and began to sing in local concerts. She won enough parts to make her solo debut at 17, in Carmina Burana, under Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl.
Though the dubbing work has drifted away, Ms. Nixon said, she keeps busy. “I still do a lot of singing,” she said. “The idea is to choose the things that are possible for me to do well and to be useful to the play at the same time. It’s just too bad people know how old I am because my voice sounds like I’m much younger.”
She was in the Broadway musical James Joyce’s The Dead, with Christopher Walken, in 1999, and she has put together a one-woman show about herself, titled The Voice of Hollywood.
She describes her show as a stroll down memory lane. “I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life,” she said. “People always love to ask me questions. And why not? I’ve had a really fantastic life, I think.”
Nixon also dubbed for Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. The liner notes in the remastered edition of The King & I's soundtrack feature more of Nixon's recollections of working with the great Deborah Kerr. The album also contains some material that was cut from the film, including Mrs. Anna's soliloquy, "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" The number shifts back and forth between dialogue and song, and Kerr and Nixon recorded it standing side by side at the same microphone, each pointing to the other when it was her turn to take over.
When I was in college, I took a film class on the genre of the movie musical. My professor told us that Barbara Cook dubbed Audrey Hepburn's voice in My Fair Lady. I tried to tell him he was wrong by asking, "Wasn't it Marni Nixon?" He assured me that it wasn't and I let it go. Don't I tell the best stories?
For further reading... Ms. Nixon has also recently published a biography, I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story, that was co-written with Stephen Cole, who has also written, among other things, the book and lyrics to a musical version of The Night of the Hunter.
Seriously. I have the album.
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