Nimble dancer served as model for Snow White
Marge Champion, the lissome dancer and choreographer who with her husband, Gower, epitomized the cleancut, allAmerican dance team of Hollywood musicals, Broadway productions and television variety shows of the 1950s, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 101.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Gregg Champion, who said Thursday that she had been living with him at his home in California for the past six months because of the pandemic.
Marge Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” ( 1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” ( 1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” ( 1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new postwar television age, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their Hollywood stardom. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.
As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” ( 1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” ( 1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, they were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced.
While their careers and lives drifted apart in the 1960s and ’ 70s, Marge and Gower Champion remained what their friends called soul mates. Both remarried. He died of a rare blood disorder in 1980, hours before a show he directed, “42nd Street,” opened on Broadway.