Marge Champion
Marjorie Celeste Champion (née Belcher; September 2, 1919 – October 21, 2020) was an American dancer and actress. At fourteen, she was hired as a dance model for Walt Disney Studios animated films. Later, she performed as an actress and dancer in film musicals, and in 1957 had a television show based on song and dance. She also did creative choreography for liturgy, and served as a dialogue and movement coach for the 1978 TV miniseries, The Awakening Land, set in the late 18th century in the Ohio Valley.
Marge Champion
September 2, 1919
October 21, 2020 (aged 101)
- Dancer
- actress
- choreographer
1930–2001
2
- Lina Basquette (half-sister)
- Katey Sagal (stepdaughter)
- Jean Sagal (stepdaughter)
- Liz Sagal (stepdaughter)
- Joey Sagal (stepson)
Early life[edit]
Champion was born in Los Angeles, California, on September 2, 1919.[1] Her father, Ernest Belcher, was a Hollywood dance director who taught Shirley Temple, Betty Grable, Ramon Novarro, Cyd Charisse, Fay Wray and Joan Crawford, as well as Champion's future husband Gower Champion;[1][2] her mother was Gladys Lee Baskette (née Rosenberg).[1] Champion had an older half sister, Lina Basquette,[2] who began acting in 1916 in silent films. Lina was the daughter of her mother's first husband, Frank Baskette, who died by suicide.[3] Champion and Basquette's maternal grandfather, Lazarus Rosenberg, was Jewish.[4][5]
Champion began dancing at an early age as her sister had done. She started as a child under the instruction of her father.[6] She studied exclusively with her father from age five until she left for New York.[7] She credited her good health and long career to her father's teaching principles: careful, strict progression of activity, emphasis on correct alignment, precise placement of body, attention to detail and to the totality of dynamics and phrasing.[7] Her first dance partner was Louis Hightower.[8] In 1930, she made her debut in the Hollywood Bowl at age 11 in the ballet "Carnival in Venice".[9] By age twelve, she became a ballet instructor at her father's studio. Champion played Tina in the Hollywood High School operetta The Red Mill. She also sang in the Hollywood High School Girls' Senior Glee Club and graduated in 1936.[10]
She was hired by The Walt Disney Studio as a dance model for their animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Her movements were copied to enhance the realism of the animated Snow White figure.[9] For one scene Champion served as model while wrapped in a baggy overcoat for two dwarfs at once, when for the "Silly Song" dance, Dopey gets on Sneezy's shoulder to dance with Snow White.[11] Champion later modeled for characters in other animated films: the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940) and Hyacinth Hippo in the Dance of the Hours segment of Fantasia, a ballet parody that she also helped choreograph. She even recalled doing some modeling for Mr. Stork in Dumbo.[6][9] When working with Disney on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Champion recalled, "the animators couldn't take a young girl out of themselves, they couldn't take the prince out of themselves".[12]
Legacy and honors[edit]
Champion choreographed Whose Life Is It Anyway?, The Day of the Locust, and Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, for which she received an Emmy Award.[6] She was honored with the Disney Legends Award in 2007.[13] Two years later, she was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame[34] In 2013, Champion received The Douglas Watt Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards ceremonies.[35]
Champion was interviewed in numerous documentaries, including for the behind-the-scenes documentary directed by Oscar-winner Chris Innis, The Story of the Swimmer, which was featured on the 2014 Grindhouse Releasing/Box Office Spectaculars Blu-ray/DVD restoration of The Swimmer. She was also interviewed at a Hollywood film festival screening of The Swimmer by filmmaker Allison Anders for the same release.[36] Champion and Donald Saddler, who met while performing together in the Follies in 2001, are the subjects of a short film about the two dancers leading meaningful lives at age 90.[37] She still danced twice a week with choreographer, actor, and an original member of American Ballet Theatre, Donald Saddler, who first performed at Jacob's Pillow in 1941. The still-spry dance partners were making a documentary "Still Dancing," which chronicles their biweekly dance sessions.[38]