The King and I (1956 film) O'Hara, who had a pleasant soprano voice, was originally cast, but Richard Rodgers did not agree to the casting. It was Yul Brynner who pressed for Deborah Kerr to play the role. Marni Nixon provided Kerr's singing for the film. Nixon and Kerr worked side-by-side in the recording studio for songs which combined speaking and singing. Nixon would also dub Kerr's singing the following year, for the film "An Affair to Remember". Donald Bogle's biography of Dorothy Dandridge claims that Dandridge was offered the role of Tuptim in partial fulfillment of her three-picture contract with 20th Century-Fox, but that Dandridge
Disability in the arts a result of their illness. Leonard Gershe's "Butterflies Are Free", about a young blind man who wins his independence from an overprotective mother, debuted on Broadway in 1969, was made into a film in 1972. The main character was played by non-blind actors in both the original run of the play and the film version. In contrast, the play "Children of a Lesser God", written by Mark Medoff and debuting in 1980, included a deaf actress playing the female lead role of a character who is deaf. This continued in the 1986 film version; Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won