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Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

[ Edited ]

[Some of us of a certain age remember those epic Hollywood musicals that often featured the fabulous dancing couple Marge and Gower Champion.  Marge passed away on Oct. 21 at the age of 101.  Another member of moviedom's Golden Age gone.  We were lucky she lasted this long (I had no idea she was still alive).]

 

Marge and Gower Champion

 

 

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 husband-and-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 cause.

The daughter of Ernest Belcher, a dance teacher known as the “ballet master to movieland,” Mrs. Champion was born into the thriving center of American show business and remained there, by force of her talent and through marriage, 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 the year Mrs. Champion turned 18 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 the early 1970s. He was handsome and clean-cut. She was girlish and effervescent. Together, they were adoring and adorable.

 

In television appearances and a slew of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musicals, including "Show Boat" (1951), they produced a chemistry that recalled for many viewers, 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.”

 
Marge Champion in Los Angeles in 2013. (Alexandra Wyman/Invision/AP)
 

Gower Champion became the Tony Award-winning director and choreographer of Broadway musicals including “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Carnival!” and “Hello, Dolly!” But on film, Basinger said, Mrs. Champion “was what made them successful. . . . He was a good choreographer, but she had the personality.”

 

Mrs. Champion learned much of her technique from her father, whose dance students, besides Temple, included Broadway musical star Gwen Verdon and ballet star Maria Tallchief.

 

Another pupil was Gower Champion, Marge’s junior high school classmate. They wed in 1947, performed at supper clubs and, within a few years, appeared on television programs such as “The Admiral Broadway Revue” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

 

In 1953, on Ed Sullivan’s program, the Champions performed several dance vignettes, each recounting a story. In one, a couple indulges in the delights of an abandoned carnival. Another sketch recounted a romantic reconciliation after a feud.

 

Reviewing the bravura performance, John Crosby, the television and radio critic with the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that the Champions were as “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography, and infinitely meticulous in execution. Above all, they are exuberantly young.” He declared them “the best dance team of its kind in the world.”

 

The Champions appeared in more than half a dozen musical films together. “Show Boat,” a box office powerhouse, featured their indelible performances in the numbers “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” and "I Might Fall Back on You."

 

Their later MGM films included "Lovely to Look At" (1952), a remake of the 1935 Astaire-Rogers film “Roberta”; “Everything I Have Is Yours," (1952), in which they received top billing as a married dance duo not unlike their own; "Give a Girl a Break" (1953), also featuring them in leading roles, under director Stanley Donen; and "Jupiter's Darling" (1955), featuring Esther Williams in a romance set in Roman antiquity.

 

Also in 1955, they joined the singer Harry Belafonte, a son of Jamaican immigrants, in a cross-country tour of the revue “Three for Tonight” that ventured into the segregated South at a time when interracial dancing was almost unknown, even considered subversive. Two years later, the Champions had a short-lived sitcom, “The Marge and Gower Champion Show,” on CBS.

 

Mrs. Champion largely retired from professional dancing after the birth of their two sons, but she remained active in show business by assisting her husband in his career. Broadway pulled him increasingly into a divided existence, with his work on the East Coast and his wife and children on the West Coast.

 
 
After their divorce, Mrs. Champion did her own choreography, winning an Emmy Award for her work on the TV movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” (1975). In time, she became an honored elder of entertainment, a rare link to an era overtaken by rock-and-roll and later “Dancing With the Stars.”
 
Bringing life to Snow White

Marjorie Celeste Belcher was born in Los Angeles on Sept. 2, 1919. Her mother, Gladys Baskette, met Ernest Belcher when she enrolled a daughter from an earlier marriage in his dance school. That daughter grew up to be Lina Basquette, a standout member of the Ziegfeld Follies, a silent-film star and a subject of fascination for her tumultuous personal life.

 

Under her father’s tutelage, she studied dance 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 told the Boston Globe.

 
 
Using the technique called rotoscoping, animators traced the footage frame by frame to produce the film that immediately won critical and popular acclaim. Mrs. Champion, who received $10 a day for her work, sat anonymously in the balcony at the film’s premiere. The moviemakers wanted Snow White “to be an illusion,” said Mrs. Champion, who also had donned bulky clothing to dance as the awkward dwarf Dopey.
 

“They didn’t want anybody to get credit for the movement,” she told the Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Mass. “The publicity department and Mr. Disney thought it would be dangerous to the movie.”

 

 
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, film and TV director Boris Sagal, died the next year after being struck by a helicopter blade while filming a TV miniseries, “World War III.”
 

In 1987, Mrs. Champion’s younger son, Blake Champion, died in a car accident. The successive tragedies plunged her into a depression from which she emerged through medication and psychotherapy, the New York Times reported in a 1999 profile.

 

Besides her son Gregg, survivors include a brother; and three grandchildren.

Mrs. Champion appeared on Broadway as recently as 2001, when she was in her early 80s, in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.” For years, she maintained residences in New York and in the Berkshires, where she participated in regional theater and dance.

 

“I have made a life at home,” she said, “without a partner, without a father or a husband directing me.”

 

(I deleted some of the text.  Goldie)

Honored Contributor
Posts: 20,163
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

There goes another name I know.

 

Oh well, life goes on.  Do remember it well though.

Honored Contributor
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

An addendum:

 

I hope Marge and Gower are dancing among the stars for all eternity.

Honored Contributor
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

I remember watching Marge and Gower Champion and wishing I could dance as gracefully and well as they did.  They danced almost as one.  Marge lived a long life and maybe it was all that activity which kept her fit and young.

 

May she be at peace with God .

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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

I have never heard of her, but may she rest in peace.

The Sky looks different when you have someone you love up there.
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

Wow, what a glamorous senior she was.  And, what a life, filled with accomplishments, while bringing joy to others with her performances.  RIP lovely lady.  

Honored Contributor
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

What a nice tribute, @golding76 .  Anyone who loves dance, and especially dance on film, would have to be enchanted with Marge and Gower Champion.  She was darling.  They were stylish, dynamic and so very talented!  R.I.P.

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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

So sorry to hear that! I loved Marge & Gower Champion. They were always on TV in the 50s on different variety shows. 101, wow, she had a good run.

Valued Contributor
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

Dancers so often do seem to live long, healthy lives!  It's not universal, of course (Gower died in 1980, I think) but I have have known many who lived to a very old age in good health.

 

She is already missed, by those of us who valued great dancing

"Behold! We are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory." J.R.R. Tolkien
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Re: Marge Champion, Half of Fabulous Dance Team of Marge & Gower Champion, Dies at 101

Oh no!   I just read her birthday announcement in our newspaper last week.  She continued dancing well into her 90's.  Loved watching her in the old movies.

* A woman is like a tea bag. You can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. *
- Eleanor Roosevelt