To be fair to the lady, she gave voice to stars

Chances are Marni Nixon sang in your living room, again and again and again.

Without ever appearing on screen, Nixon gave voice to three high-profile roles during the golden age of movie musicals: She sang Anna in

The King and I

(1956), Maria in

West Side Story

(1961), and Eliza Doolittle in

My Fair Lady

(1964), even as audiences were enchanted by the on-screen Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn.

Nixon received no credit, and limited compensation. Instead, she became famous for being unknown.

Time magazine crowned her "the ghostess with the mostest," the top ghost vocalist of all time, a strange though indelible voiceprint left in the movies.

This week, she will give face to the voice, appearing on the Academy of Music stage in a touring production of

My Fair Lady

that originated in London. Given that she's 78, Nixon is cast as Henry Higgins' mother.

It's a non-singing role.

"It is kind of ironic," she said, on the phone from Minneapolis, the show's previous stop. "I wish I would now be able to get a role where I can sing on stage."

Surprisingly, this is also her first-ever tour. "I avoided it when I was younger and had kids to raise. This is a new experience," she said, and she's happy to be along for the ride.

Her voice is still intact. A Manhattan resident, married to a retired jazz and Broadway musician, Nixon teaches and hosts master classes. She gives concerts and has performed in numerous productions on Broadway and off.

Her looks were never an issue when it came to casting. A Los Angeles native, she made her first movie appearance at age 7 and appeared in more than 50 movies over 10 years. She generally did bit parts, though she had a recurring role as Angelica Abernathy in the Lum and Abner movies of the 1940s.

Ironically (in a life positively drenched in bittersweet irony), Nixon looks remarkably like Julie Andrews, who originated Eliza Doolittle on Broadway only to lose the film role to Hepburn. (Andrews also created

Camelot

's Guenevere on stage; the movie role went to the non-singing Vanessa Redgrave).

Nixon actually is visible in what is arguably the most beloved musical movie of all time,

The Sound of Music

.

Fortunately, she worked with Andrews in the small role as Sister Sophia, Maria's closest friend. Unfortunately, her work was finished in two weeks on a Hollywood sound stage, so she "most disappointedly wasn't needed to go to Salzburg to film," as she writes in

I Could Have Sung All Night

, her remarkably frank and touching memoir.

Classically trained, first as a violinist, then as a vocalist, Nixon has performed with such eminences as Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein. In recognition of her work on his

West Side Story

, Bernstein later gave her a quarter of a percent from his own compensation for the film's soundtrack recording, which spent 54 weeks atop the Billboard charts.

Alas, that was only for the LP. "When records became a thing of the past and compact discs appeared, my royalties ceased," she says.

Wising up, Nixon finally got a good lawyer to get her compensation for the

My Fair Lady

movie cast album, even when it moved to CD. "Every once in a while, a check shows up - though it's not great, in the hundreds."

(Her son, Andrew Gold, has fared better with residuals. In addition to writing "Lonely Boy," he composed the theme song for

The Golden Girls

. "He's putting his kids through college with that one," his proud mother said.)

Despite the bumps in her career path, Nixon is upbeat. "Looking back, I was able to do so many things," she said. "I was able to be a part of musicals, and the classical scene. I could go from doing opera and chamber music to doing straight plays. Then the dubbing came along, and it was just a part of making a living."

And make a living she did. She sang with Liberace during the early years of Vegas - he designed her gown. She was on Broadway in

Nine

, in the original cast of

James Joyce's The Dead

, and did a revival of Stephen Sondheim's

Follies

, one of the few great musical works with roles for older women.

She's the voice of Grandmother Fa in Disney's

Mulan

. She has performed opera and classical music all over the States and abroad. She has done commercial work, most recently recording "Un bel di" from

Madame Butterfly

, a musical snippet used in a furniture spot and a perfume ad.

Didn't she get dejected at being passed over repeatedly for screen roles, only to do anonymous great work in recording sessions? "The main focus was keep my attitude healthy. I was always working on that and was able to raise my kids," said Nixon, the mother of three and grandmother of six. "I just kept on going."

She took ghosting seriously. "Singing is also acting," she said. "I worked hard to match my voice to the actor's. The timbre of the voice is primary to serving the acting. It's a complicated process where the acting intent needs to be very strong with excellent technique very available."

Each role presented different challenges. In

The King and I

, Kerr sang parts of the role, and her voice and Nixon's were patched together in recording. Natalie Wood didn't sing at all in

West Side Story

. Hepburn, who had a thin and lower voice than Nixon's clear soprano, was utterly frustrated at not being able to sing Eliza. The star's entire musical contribution was reduced to the lower parts of "Just You Wait."

As for small but significant assistance, Nixon gave hers to Marilyn Monroe in

Gentleman Prefer Blondes

. It's "Nixon as Monroe" singing the line "these rocks don't lose their shape" in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

My Fair Lady

's Eliza remains Nixon's favorite role, performed in this production by England's Lisa O'Hare.

"The project is so noble, and the role so challenging. You're looking at the growth of a guttersnipe growing into being accepted as a grande dame," Nixon said. "It's two roles with different voices, different classes, and it's all about diction. Plus you have the combination of the music and the story."

Nixon eventually portrayed Eliza herself in a 1964 production at New York's City Center.

As for her current role, she has tackled the part with characteristic bonhomie. "It's an important role" she said, "in that you get to show where the Higgins character comes from through the way he relates to her and she to him - her snide put-downs and disapprovals, and how he became who he is without getting crushed by that."

It's impossible not to think the same of Nixon. Through all that extraordinary work, for so little credit, she has been resilient while gradually earning recognition for her contributions. Or, to paraphrase Henry Higgins, she's grown accustomed to her place.