It’s finally happened—Death has beaten me. Marni Nixon was on the calendar for Celebrating the Living Sunday. And yet here we are; that noteworthy voice is silenced, and we are too late.

You probably don’t know her face. She did physically appear in a few movies, but even trying to figure it out, I was unsure which nun she was in The Sound of Music. Mostly, though, she was known for her voice, which was used to replace the voices of women who weren’t quite up to the roles in which they’d been cast.

And so Marni Nixon was Maria (from West Side Story; Julie Andrews didn’t need the dubbing!); she was Anna Leonowens; she was Eliza Doolittle. She was informed that, should people come to learn that she was Anna, she’d never work in Hollywood again. How the secret came to be revealed, I cannot say; I grew up knowing about her. She was the voice—she even dubbed Rita Moreno and Natalie Wood both, when there were notes Rita Moreno couldn’t hit.

Actually, upon being asked who should appear in a movie musical version of La Cage Aux Folles, Havey Fierstein cheerfully said, “Me! Dubbed by Marni Nixon!” It would, I grant you, have been slightly more noticeable than when she dubbed Deborah Kerr (in two different movies; remember that she sings in An Affair to Remember), but it would certainly have been funny.

During my most recent viewing of The Sound of Music, I really was disappointed that I couldn’t tell which nun she was; it seemed only right to give her a memorable role. It’s actually one of two different movies that she made with Julie Andrews, as she was also a singing goose in Mary Poppins, and I feel certain she was cast because it only seemed fair to let her appear for once. But she isn’t the nun who argues against Maria or the one who defends her; she’s just one of the nuns. Not really fair, I thought. Presumably, she was eventually cast in Mulan under her own name out of a sense of tribute, but again, you don’t see her in Mulan.

It turns out that she and I were from the same town, and indeed she and my mom were probably born in the same hospital, since she’s listed as being born in Altadena, California. (There was only one hospital there, and there aren’t any now.) She even then moved to Seattle, where she lived for a while, doing local kids’ TV. She died in New York of breast cancer, but she will always be remembered. For her voice, at least.