Marge Champion

Born on September 2, 1919 on Orange Drive, in Hollywood, Marjorie Celeste Belcher –her maiden name– was the daughter of Ernest Belcher, founder of the School of Celeste Dance, where she taught dance to great stars such as Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse . , and who was also at the service of director Cecil B. DeMille . The girl’s older half-sister, Lina Basquette, triumphed as an actress in the silent film era. Under the supervision of her parent, she started dancing at a very young age.

When he was 11 years old, he made his debut at the Hollywood Bowl, in the ballet “Carnival in Venice”. After graduating from Hollywood High, she was hired by Walt Disney, a friend of his father, so that his animators could copy his movements, in order to achieve greater realism with the animated figure of Snow White. “I would go one, two or three days each month,” he recalled in an interview. “They filmed me with a sixteen-millimeter camera. They had accessories, for example, if Snow White had to lie on a bed they brought me one. With what I could do during a work day, I kept them busy for a couple of weeks “. She felt very honored to have been part of this project. “I had been given the opportunity to be a part of animation history.” She would return to work for the company, also serving as a model for the Blue Fairy, from Pinocchio , Mr. Stork, in Dumbo ., already one of the animals in the segment “La Danza de las Horas”, from Fantasia .

In 1937, she married one of the studio’s most prestigious animators, Art Babbitt, creator of Goofy, but they divorced three years later. “I wanted children and to stay at home, but I thought I had practiced enough and had to keep trying my luck as a dancer.” She later became attached to fellow dancer Gower Champion , from whom Marge Champion took the stage name. She with him appeared in numerous Broadway shows, and in MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, such as  Magnolia (1951) ,  Three for the Show , or  Jupiter’s Beloved . In 1957, they starred in a television series, The Marge and Gower Champion Show ., a song-and-dance sitcom featuring Marge as a dancer and Gower as a choreographer.

Marge Champion also appears as a supporting role in the successful feature films  El guateque  and  El nadador . Also separated from Champion, she began a relationship with the director Boris Sagal  ( The Last Man… Alive ), from 1977 until his death in an accident, in 1981. 

Late in her career, she played a ballet teacher in an episode of Fame in 1982, and appeared as the aging musical star Emily Whitman in the Broadway revival of  Stephen Sondheim ‘s “Follies” in 2001.