Obituary: Marni Nixon

Hollywood wanted her existence to be kept secret, but inevitably news leaked out, often revealed by the actresses for whom she was covering. "It was all sort of silly," she said, wondering why make-up artists were credited by film-makers but she was not. "As Shakespeare says, 'The play's the thing'."

Some leading ladies were grateful, such as Deborah Kerr, for whom Marni Nixon would take over seamlessly mid-phrase. Others were less so, including Natalie Wood, who Nixon recalled was "very angry that the word got out [that her voice would be replaced] and walked off the picture".

Although she was the "ghostess with the mostest", as Time magazine called her, Marni Nixon also enjoyed a respectable career in her own name, ranging from high opera to Broadway musicals, and art song to cabaret. "Stardom isn't the goal," she insisted. "Staying in the industry and being successful at what you do is."

Margaret Nixon McEathron was born in Altadena, California, on February 22 1930, of Scottish-German descent. She was soon playing the violin, joining a Hollywood babies' orchestra at the age of four. On one occasion she forgot her instrument for a music competition so sang instead, won a prize and decided to drop the violin.

She was a messenger at MGM when she covered for Margaret O'Brien, the child actress, singing a Hindu lullaby in The Secret Garden. Her next outing was as one of the angel voices that Ingrid Bergman heard in Joan of Arc, after which the studios came calling for her perfect pitch, flexible voice and sight-reading ability.

During West Side Story she also dubbed Rita Moreno's lines in Tonight, effectively singing a duet with herself. At that point she asked for - but was refused - a royalty payment. Leonard Bernstein, however, offered her a small percentage of his royalties. Her only physical appearance in a film was as Sister Sophia, one of the nuns singing How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria? opposite Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, though she did not even get a trip to the Swiss Alps out of it, the set being recreated in Hollywood.

By the end of the 1960s demand for voice doubles was dropping off, but Marni Nixon was still appearing in opera houses, concert halls, nightclubs and on the cabaret circuit, including touring with Liberace and Victor Borge.

"Borge is a better all-round musician and pianist than Lee was," she recalled, "but both were brilliant and talented

She was heard twice at the Wigmore Hall in London, on both occasions in serious programmes that found favour with the critics, one of whom said that she "showed herself the possessor of a highly developed technique and a musician of acuity and insight".

In later life Marni Nixon toured a one-woman show about life as a ghost singer, published a memoir, I Could Have Sung All Night - making sure to credit her own ghost writer - and won four Emmys for her children's television show, Boomerang.

In 1950 she married Ernest Gold, who wrote the Oscar-winning score to Exodus. The marriage was dissolved and in 1971 she married Lajos Fenster, a doctor. That too was dissolved and in 1983 she married Albert Block, a musician who died last year. A son from her first marriage also predeceased her. She is survived by two daughters from that marriage.

©Telegraph