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Thanks for posting, Mme. Hermine. Sorry to hear this.

It’s a shame that her name became synonymous with dubbing and eventually helped to give it a bad name, because when dubbing is done right, as in the films of Jacques Demy, it can work just fine. As Deborah Kerr and Nixon also demonstrated, the technique can be effective when actor and singer work together. When such a collaboration is reluctant, as with Hepburn, or nonexistent, as with Wood, the end product suffers. The actor has to acknowledge her own limits and put her ego aside, as Kerr did.

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Dirac, I was the ASM on an off Broadway musical called "Taking My Turn". 1983. Intermedia Theater in the East Village. (when the EV was still a fun place!!) It was a bittersweet musical on the joys and tribulations of aging. I can appreciate it's message far more now than when I did the show, still it remains a favorite of mine. Also in the cast were Margaret Whiting, Cissy Houston, Ted Thurston, Tiger Haynes , Shileh Smith among others. There wasn't a "diva" among them. Just total professionals. All happy to still be performing and doing a most marvelous job of it. Marni was sweet and as I said generous to all. And very funny too! It was pure joy to go to the theater every night and see these wonderful actors doing what they all did best. I wish that the Summer Encores Series here in NYC would revive it sometime. It's worth another look. I believe there is the PBS showing of it somewhere on YouTube. Check it out.

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I loved her voice. I used to say she was 'the most famous singer no one ever heard of'. The entire subject of dubbed vocals in Hollywood is a strange one - the bosses made some really odd choices at times, but Marni always seemed to sound right.

In Singin' in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds was dubbed by Betty Royce, except, inexplicably, on her last number – “Singin’ in the Rain”, where she gets to actually sing for herself. But it’s pretty bizarre for a character’s singing voice to change between songs. It’s often hard to know what the Hollywood bosses were thinking. Juanita Hall (as Bloody Mary in South Pacific) had her singing dubbed for the film version by Muriel Smith, who played Bloody Mary in the London stage production. Problem was, Juanita Hall had sung the part something like 500 times on Broadway, and on the freakin’ Broadway cast album. I heard that Richard Rodgers actually preferred Muriel Smith’s voice, so that may have had something to do with it.

Dana Andrews was trained as an operatic singer, but was barely allowed to sing a note of his own (that’s not his singing voice in State Fair). He performed a kind of Russian-ish children's song in The North Star, and I think that's it.

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