Marge Champion

Marjorie Celeste Belcher, professionally known as Marge Champion, was born in Los Angeles in 1919 and grew up inside a professional dance environment. Her father, Ernest Belcher, was a prominent Hollywood dance teacher, and she began training as a child, teaching ballet by age twelve. This early combination of technique, observation, and teaching prepared her to translate movement for both live performers and animators.

As a teenager, Champion became the live-action movement reference for Snow White in Walt Disney's 1937 *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs*. She performed actions and dances for artists to study rather than supplying drawings or the character's voice. The Television Academy also credits her as a movement model for the Blue Fairy in *Pinocchio* and the dancing hippopotami in *Fantasia*. Her contribution was an embodied reference that informed animated movement rather than authorship of the characters themselves.

Champion moved between Broadway and Hollywood, appearing on Broadway in *What's Up* in 1943 and later building a celebrated partnership with dancer-choreographer Gower Champion, whom she married in 1947. As Marge and Gower Champion, they performed in films including *Show Boat*, *Lovely to Look At*, and *Everything I Have Is Yours*, while also appearing frequently on early television. Their public image rested on coordination, musical clarity, and conversational partnering rather than on virtuosity isolated from character.

Television gave the Champions a medium in which their stagecraft could reach a national audience. They appeared on programs including *Admiral Broadway Revue*, *The Ed Sullivan Show*, and *The Dinah Shore Chevy Show*, followed by their own 1957 situation-comedy-and-dance series, *The Marge and Gower Champion Show*. Marge's work extended beyond performing into choreography and the collaborative construction of dance numbers.

After the performing partnership ended, Champion continued as a choreographer and teacher. Her choreography for the 1975 television movie *Queen of the Stardust Ballroom* won the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. Late in life she returned to Broadway in the 2001 revival of *Follies*, demonstrating that her career extended well beyond Hollywood's studio era.

Champion maintained a significant relationship with Jacob's Pillow. A 1986 recording preserves a performance with her son Blake Champion, and in 1991 she donated Blake's Barn to the Pillow in his memory. The building became an archive and exhibition space, extending her contribution from performance to the preservation of dance history. She was named a Disney Legend in 2007 and died in Los Angeles in 2020 at age 101.