Celebrating the greatest ‘ghost’ singer Marni Nixon

This is sad news: the great Marni Nixon has died at the age of 86. She is the woman who Time magazine called her “The Ghostess with the Mostest” because she is most famous for dubbing the singing voices of the leading actresses in films, including The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady. Her first onscreen appearance was as Sister Sophia in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. In the DVD commentary to the film, director Robert Wise comments that audiences were finally able to see the woman whose voice they knew so well. Under her own name, beginning in the 1980s, Nixon recorded songs by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Arnold Schönberg, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Anton Webern. She was nominated for two Grammy Awards. In 2001, Nixon played Heidi Schiller in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Her autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night, was published in 2006. May she rest in peace.