Marge Champion, 101; dancer starred in many Hollywood musicals

Marge Champion, a dancer who gave life to Snow White as a live-action model for Disney’s 1937 animated film, and who later hoofed across the screen with Gower Champion in a reigning husband- andwife duo at the heyday of Hollywood musicals and the dawn of television, died Oct. 21 in Los Angeles. She was 101.

Her son Gregg Champion confirmed her death but did not cite a specific cause.

The daughter of Ernest Belcher, a dance teacher known as the “ballet master to movieland,” Champion was born into the thriving center of American show business and remained there, through marriage and by force of her talent, for decades.

As a young assistant to her father, she gave dance lessons to a student eight years her junior, Shirley Temple. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Disney’s first full-length animated feature, was released the year Champion turned 18 and introduced her graceful motion — although not her name in the uncredited role — to millions.

Fame arrived in the late 1940s, when she and Gower Champion began a professional dance partnership that continued through the next decade and a marriage that lasted until the early 1970s. He was handsome and cleancut. She was girlish and effervescent. Together, they were adoring and adorable.

In television appearances and a slew of Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer movie musicals including “Show Boat” (1951), they produced a chemistry that recalled for many viewers, if only distantly, the earlier performances of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

“Because they are married, they form a union in both their performances and in their dancing that suggests to the viewer honesty and truth,” film historian Jeanine Basinger said of the Champions. “A married couple knows each other’s moves. When they are actually then skilled and attractive dancers, those moves become art.”

Gower Champion became the Tony Award-winning director and choreographer of Broadway musicals including “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Carnival!” and “Hello, Dolly!” But on film, Basinger said, Champion “was what made them successful ... He was a good choreographer, but she had the personality.”

Champion learned much of her technique from her father, whose dance students, besides Temple, included Broadway musical star Gwen Verdon and ballet star Maria Tallchief.

Another pupil was Gower, Marge’s junior high school classmate. They wed in 1947, performed at supper clubs and, within a few years, appeared on television programs such as “The Admiral Broadway Revue” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

In 1953, on Ed Sullivan’s program, the Champions performed several dance vignettes, each recounting a story. In one, a couple indulges in the delights of an abandoned carnival. Another sketch recounted a romantic reconciliation after a feud.

Reviewing the bravura performance, John Crosby, the television and radio critic with the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that the Champions were as “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography, and infinitely meticulous in execution. Above all, they are exuberantly young.” He declared them “the best dance team of its kind in the world.”