...Boulez's Improvisation sur Mallarme I under Leonard Bernstein, she will always be associated with her movie soundtracks. Albums with Nixon as the voice of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and the voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story sold in the multiple millions, with the latter earning a listing in the Guinness Book of Worm Records. Yet not long ago, a contestant on the television game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" could win a substantial sum simply for knowing Nixon's name.

Before there was "crossover," there was Marni Nixon. In the past few years, New Yorkers have seen her in the Broadway revivals of Follies and Nine. They have also heard her in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Peter Maxwell Davies's Miss Donnithorne's Maggot. It is a breadth of repertoire Nixon has maintained for fifty years. After a 1954 Broadway debut with Zizi Jeanmaire in The Girl in Pink Tights, she returned to her native California and was tapped by Lotte Lehmann for the role of Zetbinetta in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Nixon learned the difficult role in ten days, and Lehmann became one of her biggest boosters. "She kept calling me and saying, 'You've got to get yourself to the East Coast again, you've got to move there and stay there,'" Nixon recalls. But she had found New York a difficult...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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