Dancer was model for Disney’s Snow White

Also taught Shirley Temple how to hoof it

Marge Champion, who hoofed across the screen in a reigning husband-and-wife duo in the heyday of Hollywood musicals, died Oct. 21 in Los Angeles, at 101.

As a young assistant to her father — “ballet master to movieland” Ernest Belcher — she gave dance lessons to Shirley Temple.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s first full-length animated feature, for which she was the liveaction model, introduced her graceful motion — but she wasn’t credited.

Fame arrived in the late 1940s, when she and Gower Champion began a dance partnership. They were adoring and adorable.

The pair had been junior high classmates. They wed in 1947, performed at supper clubs and were on the Admiral Broadway Revue with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

“Because they are married, they form a union in both their performances and in their dancing that suggests honesty and truth,” film historian Jeanine Basinger said.

In 1953, after their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, New York Herald Tribune TV and radio critic John Crosby declared them “the best dance team of its kind in the world.”

Their MGM films included Show Boat, Lovely to Look At, Everything I Have Is Yours, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.

In 1955, they joined Harry Belafonte in a tour of the revue Three for Tonight that went into the segregated South.

The pair divorced, and Champion did her own choreography, winning an Emmy for the TV movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975).

Marjorie Celeste Belcher was born in Los Angeles on Sept. 2, 1919.

She was chosen from nearly 300 dancers to give Snow White her motion. Wearing high heels — and sometimes a helmet to mimic Snow White’s solidly coiffed hair — she pranced and posed before cameras that recorded her movement on film.

Animators traced the footage frame by frame to produce the film that immediately won acclaim. She was paid $ 10 a day. She later danced as the awkward dwarf Dopey, the nimble hippopotamus in Fantasia (at $25) and as the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.

In 1980, Gower Champion died the opening day of 42nd Street, which he had directed. Her third husband, film and TV director Boris Sagal, died the next year after being struck by a helicopter blade while filming a TV movie.

Champion appeared on Broadway as recently as 2001, when she was in her early 80s, in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

In 1987, her younger son, Blake, died in a car accident.

She is survived by a son and three grandchildren.