Marni Nixon was born Margaret Nixon McEathron in Altadena, California on February 22, 1930. She began studying the violin at the age of 4 and throughout her childhood played bit parts in a string of Hollywood movies. At the age of 11, she won a vocal competition at the Los Angeles County Fair and became a private pupil of Vera Schwarz, a distinguished Austrian soprano. At the age of 17, she appeared as a vocal soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and later studied opera at Tanglewood.
Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for the next two decades, she lent her voice to about 50 films. Her first significant dubbing job was singing a Hindu lullaby for Margaret O'Brien in The Secret Garden. She later dubbed Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Jeanne Crain in Cheaper by the Dozen, Janet Leigh in Pepe, and Ida Lupino in Jennifer. She also supplied the singing voice of Grandmother Fa in Disney's animated film Mulan.
In 1964, she appeared on stage as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady at City Center in New York. On Broadway, she appeared in The Girl in Pink Tights in 1954, James Joyce's The Dead in 2000, Follies in 2001, and Nine in 2003. She taught for many years at the California Institute of the Arts, where she was the founding director of the vocal department. Her memoir, I Could Have Sung All Night, was published in 2006. She died from breast cancer on July 24, 2016 at the age of 86.
030