Marge Champion Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki

Marge Champion Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki

Marjorie Celeste Champion (née Belcher; born September 2, 1919) is an

American dancer and actress. At 14, 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 TV show based on song

and dance. She has also done 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.She became a centenarian in September 2019.Champion was born on

September 2, 1919, in Los Angeles, California, to Hollywood dance

director Ernest Belcher and his wife, Gladys Lee Baskette (née

Rosenberg). She had an older half sister, Lina Basquette, who already

was acting in silent films at the age of twelve. Lina was the daughter

of her mother's first husband, Frank Baskette, who had committed

suicide.Marjorie began dancing at an early age as her sister had done.

She began dancing as a child under the instruction of her father,

Ernest Belcher, a noted Hollywood ballet coach who trained Shirley

Temple, Cyd Charisse, and Gwen Verdon. She studied exclusively with

her father from age five until she left for New York. She credits 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. Her first dance partner was Louis

Hightower. In 1930, she made her debut in the Hollywood Bowl at age 11

in the ballet "Carnival in Venice". By age twelve, she became a ballet

instructor at her father's studio. Marge 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. 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. For one scene

Belcher served as model while wrapped in baggy overcoat for two dwarfs

at once, when for the "Silly Song" dance, Dopey gets on Sneezy's

shoulder to dance with Snow White. Belcher 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 recalls doing

some modeling for Mr.Stork in Dumbo. When working with Disney on Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs, Champion recalls "the animators couldn't

take a young girl out of themselves, they couldn't take the prints out

of themselves".
Marge Champion Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki


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