Marge Champion, Emmy-winning dancer and movement model for 1937’s ‘Snow White,’ dies at 101
Marge Champion, the Emmy-winning choreographer and dancer who served as the real-life movement model for the original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” Disney film, has died.
She passed away Wednesday in Los Angeles at the age of 101, dance instructor Pierre Dulaine told The Hollywood Reporter.
Her father, the ballet dancer, teacher and director Ernest Belcher, worked with film stars including Charlie Chaplin and helped her make her stage debut at the Hollywood Bowl at age 11.
She later caught the eye of a Disney scout and became the movement model for the animation team working on “Snow White” in the 1930s, she told the Los Angeles Times in 2009.
She recalled spending a few days a month acting out scenes as Snow White on a sound stage at age 14. Her movements were captured on 16-millimeter film that was later rotoscoped — a technique that allows images from live-action films to be traced to create an animated sequence.
“When Snow White was running through the forest and scared to death, they had ropes hanging from a clothesline so I would be pushing them aside,” she told The Times.
“If there was a bed where Show White had to go pray, they had a cot there so I could kneel beside it. It was always very rudimentary and very hot lights, because they wanted as strong a contrast as possible,” she said.
She also danced the part of Dopey and later served as the model for the Blue Fairy in “Pinocchio” (1940), Hyacinth Hippo in “Fantasia” (1940) and Mr. Stock in “Dumbo” (1941).
Champion married one of the Disney animators, Art Babbitt, a month shy of her 18th birthday, but the union was short-lived. She traveled to New York with the Three Stooges in a 1939 vaudeville show and made her Broadway debut in the 1943 musical “What’s Up” before starring as the Fair Witch in “Dark of the Moon” in 1945.
She formed a dancing duo with second husband Gower Champion, and together they performed in nightclubs, for Sid Ceasar and Ed Sullivan on TV and in several MGM musicals, including a 1951 remake of “Show Boat” starring Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel.
In 1957, the husband and wife co-starred in their eponymous CBS show, “The Marge and Gower Champion Show,” performing song-and-dance numbers in a sitcom format with Marge playing a dancer, Gower playing a choreographer and Buddy Rich appearing as a character named Cozy.
Champion won her Emmy for choreographing the 1975 telefilm “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.” She later choreographed the 1981 movie “Whose Life Is it Anyway?” starring Richard Dreyfuss.
In 2007, she was honored with the Disney Legends Award.
Champion is survived by her son, producer-director Gregg Champion, and step-children including actress Katey Sagal, who played Peggy Bundy on “Married… with Children.”
