New York — Hollywood voice double Marni Nixon, whose singing was heard in place of the leading actresses in such classic movie musicals as West Side Story, The King and I and My Fair Lady, has died. She was 86.

Michael Kirsten, senior vice president of Nixon’s talent agency, Harden-Curtis Assoc., said she died Sunday of cancer in New York.

Nixon initially resented the uncredited dubbing work, but came to terms with it. “I realized now that this was something that would outlive me. Something that would last,” she wrote in her 2006 memoir, I Could Have Sung All Night.

In the heyday of the Hollywood musical, studios often paid big money for film rights to Broadway shows, then cast them with popular non-singing actors and actresses.

Such was the case with the 1956 hit The King and I, in which filmmakers dubbed Deborah Kerr’s voice with Nixon’s.

“I was brought in and had to follow along with her, getting her diction and acting style,” Nixon recalled in 2004. “She in turn would study how I looked when I hit the high notes.”

Nixon did the same for Natalie Wood in 1961’s West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in 1964’s My Fair Lady. She went uncredited in the films and soundtrack albums and was warned by filmmakers not to let her role be known.

Word began to leak out, however, and Kerr herself blew Nixon’s cover when she praised her work on The King and I.