Dancer gave Snow White her moves
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 husbandand-wife 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 centre of U.S. show business and remained there, through marriage and by force of 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 when Champion was a teen 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 they divorced in the early 1970s. He was handsome and clean-cut. She was girlish and effervescent. In TV appearances
and a slew of MGM movie musicals, they produced a chemistry that recalled for many viewers, even 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.”
Champion Under her studied father's dance tutelage, forms including ballet, acrobatics and tap and began her professional career as Marjorie Bell. “They thought Bell would look better on a marquee than Belcher,” she said.
Champion recounted that one day a scout for Walt Disney — “Uncle Walt” to her — came to her father's dance school in search of a model for the heroine of Snow White. Adriana Caselotti was se
Wearing high heels and a high-collared dress — and sometimes a helmet to mimic Snow White's solidly coiffed hair — she pranced, twirled and posed before cameras that recorded her movements on 16-millimetre film.
lected to provide Snow White's voice. Champion was chosen from among nearly 300 dancers to give the character her motion.
toscoping, Using a technique animators traced called the rofootage frame by frame to produce the film that immediately won critical and popular acclaim. Champion, who received $10 a day for
her work, sat anonymously in the balcony at the film's première. The moviemakers wanted Snow White “to be an illusion,” said Champion, who also donned bulky clothing to dance as the awkward dwarf Dop-ey
Her first marriage, to Disney animator Art Babbitt, ended in divorce. In 1980, Gower Champion died the day of the New York opening of the musical 42nd Street, which he had directed. Her third husband, director Boris Sagal, died the next year after being struck by a helicopter blade while filming a TV movie, World War III.