Dancer was model for Disney's Snow White

Marge Champion, who has died aged 101, was a popular dancer and choreographer in Hollywood films and on the stage, and modelled for the classic Disney heroine Snow White and the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.

With her husband and dancing partner Gower Champion, she became a celebrated dance star in the 1950s.

But she was still Marjorie Belcher and in her mid-teens when, for $10 a day in 1935, she was filmed for the benefit of Disney animators as a model for the heroine in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Although her future husband, Art Babbitt, was one of the principal members of the animating team and supervised much of the reference filming, the character of Snow White herself was animated by Grim Natwick, who had brought the cartoon sex siren Betty Boop to life on the silver screen years before.

Babbitt instituted art classes for his fellow animators, so that they would make the movements of their screen characters more realistic. But Walt Disney himself ordered that the screen Snow White should be young and innocent, essentially a child, and earlier drafts were redrawn to make her leaner, sharper, less “cartoonish” and more realistic.

To aid the animators in realizing this “sweet and graceful little girl” on the screen, Natwick shot liveaction film of Marjorie Belcher. She was intended to provide the filmmakers with inspiration, to suggest movement and behaviour, and even Snow White's personality. Animators watched the developed film through a viewfinder and chose poses they liked.

Time magazine declared it “an authentic masterpiece.”

Behind the scenes, however, Marjorie Belcher had earned the displeasure of Walt Disney by starting an affair with Art Babbitt. When Disney got wind of the affair he prepared to fire the animator. Marjorie Belcher and Babbitt quickly got married.

Marjorie Celeste Belcher was born on Sept. 2, 1919 in Los Angeles. Her British father, Ernest Belcher, an experienced Hollywood ballet master, coached her in acrobatic, tap, ballet and Spanish dancing.

After retiring from films, Marge Champion worked as a dance teacher and a choreographer in New York. In 1982 she made a rare television appearance in the series Fame. In 2001 she appeared in a Broadway revival of Follies.

Marge Champion