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 Associates, said she died Sunday of cancer in New York. “She passed away peacefully with her family at her side,” he said.

Nixon, who was initially uncredited for her work, early on resented the dubbing work but later 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 hit 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.”

She went uncredited in the films and on their soundtrack albums and was warned by the filmmakers that if she ever let it be known that she was doing the singing, “they would run me out of town.”