#1 - See her in-person October 5th! More info at bottom of this article!
Marge's father, Ernest Belcher, worked with Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett. He did the opening shows at the Hollywood Bowl.
Marge made her debut at the Bowl at age 11. Two years later, she was one of three girls who caught the attention of a Disney scout and was asked to audition at Walt Disney's old studio on Hyperion Avenue. Walt Disney told Marge Champion to call him Uncle Walt because she was too young to call him Walt.
Marge got her first taste of blending dance and acting as a teenager, when she was the model for Snow White in Walt Disney's 1937 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the groundbreaking full-length animated film.
Every frame of her footage was rotoscoped -- traced -- by the animators. "They didn't use every frame, but they couldn't get the movement or my moves or my eyes without it."
From the age of 14, Champion performed scenes as Snow White for the animators. "It was maybe one or two or three days a month," she says. "They shot me on 16-millimeter film, and I could do enough in a day's work to keep them busy for two weeks."
She says the process of playing Snow White was simple. "When Snow White was running through the forest and scared to death, they had ropes hanging from a clothesline so I would be pushing them aside," recalls Champion. "If there was a bed where Show White had to go pray, they had a cot there so I could kneel beside it. It was always very rudimentary and very hot lights, because they wanted as strong a contrast as possible."
Champion also went on to model for the Blue Fairy in 1940's "Pinocchio" and the Dancing Hippo in "Fantasia."
She even married one of the Disney animators, Art Babbitt, one month shy of her 18th birthday. "I was married to him for a very short time. When I went to New York with the Three Stooges in a vaudeville show in 1939, he said come back to Los Angeles and have babies. But that wasn't what I had studied 15 years for."
She starred in MGM's Showboat.
She's the one who "discovered" Carol Channing.
During the late 1940s and throughout the '50s, there was no hotter dance team than Marge Champion and her second husband, Gower Champion. Marge and Gower divorced in 1973; Gower Champion, who became an award-winning theater director and choreographer, died in 1980.
On Sunday, October 5th at 5:00 PM, Marge Champion and Richard Skipper will sit down at the Spiral Theater Studio to discuss Marge's vast and wonderful career and how she is doing today, at 95 years young. A Q&A with the audience and "meet and greet" follows.
The Spiral Theater Studio is now located at 300 West 43rd Street (off of 8th Avenue), Room 603, New York, NY 10036. Seating is Limited. An RSVP is highly recommended. Call 845-365-0720.
More information about this event and about Richard Skipper at:
https://www.richardskipper.com/
