One of the most fascinating, inspirational and talented creatives nominated for an Oscar this year will not be at the ceremony on 2 March. “Oh, I’m not going. No, no, no. I’ll be 90 in June, my dear,” says Orin O’Brien, double bassist and the star of nominated short documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra. “That’s no excuse,” I tell her. Over Zoom, she looks and sounds more than capable of flying the plane there herself. “No. You couldn’t get me on a plane these days. People are so badly behaved. I’m staying here in my nice apartment in New York. I will cook dinner for my friends in the orchestra. Some students will come over.”

O’Brien has never sought the bright lights. Her chosen instrument, the double bass, means she sits at the back of the orchestra, providing harmonies and structure. One scene shows her telling her students: “You don’t want to stick out. You’re a support for what else is going on. You’re the floor under everybody that would collapse if it wasn’t secure.”

And yet she has found herself sticking out, like it or not. In 1966, aged 31, O’Brien made history by becoming the first woman to be employed full-time at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, then 104 members. “All this attention now is old hat to me,” she says. “When I joined, I just wanted to be a part of my section, and part of the orchestra. But I was the centre of attention, which was upsetting and embarrassing. On tour, instead of having dinner with my friends in the orchestra, I did radio interviews in almost every city we played in.”

Press coverage talked about her being “one of the boys”; “Miss O’Brien is as curvy as the double bass she plays,” leered Time magazine; “on tour, the men fall over themselves to carry her bags”.

“No, they didn’t,” she says indignantly. “Nobody carried my suitcase because they were carrying their own instruments!” She was a member of the orchestra for 55 years; this film, made by her niece Molly O’Brien, is a tribute to a remarkable life lived seeking to be unremarkable.

“I chose the double bass because I liked the idea of playing with other musicians. I didn’t have ambition to be a soloist. I like being in the background,” says O’Brien, who started playing the instrument at 16. “I loved the vibration you feel in your whole body and how you feel its low tones, but I loved equally the harmony that it made playing with the others.” She insists she never heard from anyone even the suggestion that this almost two-metre high instrument weighing on average 15kg was not suitable for a girl. In fact, “my teacher in New York, Fred Zimmerman – who was a genius – told me that he thought that girls were more sensitive than boys about drawing a tone out of a double bass. Boys kind of tried to force it out using their strength, he said, but girls coaxed the tone out, which is the way you have to do it.”

Likewise, in the orchestra, she was only ever welcomed and cherished, she insists. She joined the Philharmonic with 10 years’ orchestral experience playing already under her belt she points out. “The minute they knew I was experienced and wouldn’t make a fool out of myself or ruin their professional work, the players were fine. If people complained about me, well, nobody ever said it to me in person.”

But, astonishing as it now sounds, she did feel guilty for a while, she says, for taking a job that could have gone to a man. “In the 1950s and 60s, there was an opinion that if you gave a job to a single woman, you were depriving a married man with a family to support of one. It was something that I felt guilty about for a while. But then I thought, ‘I’m supporting me – I’m my family.’ And I stopped feeling guilty because there were other single people in the orchestra too and everybody works very hard for a job like that and not everybody can be chosen.”

Back in 1966 it was the legendary Leonard Bernstein who hired O’Brien. “I love Orin because she’s a source of radiance in the orchestra,” he said at the time. “Her musical involvement is total, and whenever I look in her direction, and inevitably find her looking intently back at me, I marvel at this concentration.”

“Yeah, well, he was very fun to look at,” laughs O’Brien. “If you blinked, you might miss an instruction or a hint about what he wanted us to do, or what he was thinking and feeling at the time – it was like a kaleidoscope of musical thrills.”

Of today’s conductors, she singles out Vladimir Jurowski (“One of our favourite conductors ever … every gesture means something”) and Nathalie Stutzmann (“She’s outstanding. Totally professional and she has a wonderful spirit”). Stutzmann was in New York recently conducting the NY Phil and talked to O’Brien after the concert. “She told me she had seen my movie and loved it. And she said, I went through some of the same things that you did when I started out as a young female conductor.”

I ask Molly about the film’s genesis. “I’ve had this little voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Make a film about your aunt Orin’ for at least 10 years,” she says. “In 2015, she invited me to go on tour with her in Europe, and she said I could bring a camera. But then she was unsure she wanted me to film, and I didn’t take it out of the bag the whole trip.”

Back in New York, her aunt’s packed schedule didn’t help. A full-time member of the orchestra, she was also teaching at three conservatories and had private students.

Orin elaborates: “Each week, I had four rehearsals, four concerts. I basically had no private time at all, except on Sundays and then I used to bake bread and also teach. I would start the baking early in the morning. I would say to my first student, ‘OK, practice for five minutes’, and I’d go and punch up the dough. And by the end of the day the bread would be baked and the last student would get a slice of fresh bread!”

“But I kept asking her about a film,” says Molly, through laughter, “and she kept saying ‘No’ until in 2021, when all the musicians were stuck at home during the pandemic’ and she made the decision to retire.”

Why does she think her film has touched so many? “I certainly never expected that my documentary about my aunt in her 80s who plays the double bass would make it to the Oscars,” she says. “But her story is inspiring, not only to young female musicians, but I’m getting calls from folks who are sharing it with their kids, and with their grandmothers and their aunts and their friends. The film is about the first woman ever hired full-time by the New York Philharmonic, but it’s also about rejecting the celebrity culture we’re so immersed in, and enjoying the work of those around you as much as you’re enjoying yourself. Put down the violin, pick up the double bass is maybe one way to put it.”

Has Orin’s life changed since the film’s success? “No, I’m still just hiding behind my bass in my apartment and getting on with things,” she says. “But I have gotten a lot of fan mail from people I haven’t seen for years and also from people saying they cried when they saw the film because it reminded them of something in their lives.”

Yes, you are beloved, Molly tells her, and despite your not wanting to be in the spotlight, you are celebrated all over the world.

As the conversation draws to a close, Orin reminisces about her childhood when music was, even then, front and centre. “I used to listen to the New York Philharmonic radio broadcasts on Sunday instead of going to church. My father used to drive my brother, who was an altar boy, and me there. I’d say, ‘Dad, if you don’t mind, I’ll sit in the parking lot while you’re in church and listen to the Philharmonic.’ And he let me. I made up my mind that my religion was music.” Molly smiles: “I wish that story was in the film.”

• The Only Girl in the Orchestra is on Netflix. The Academy Awards are on 2 March

• This article was amended on 18 February 2025. An earlier version quoted Orin O’Brien as saying: “I never let a man carry my bass for me.” In fact, this was said by her former student Jacqui Danilow during a conversation with O’Brien in the documentary.