Marge Champion
Born Marjorie Belcher on
Sept. 2, 1919
in Los Angeles, CA
During the late 1940s and throughout the '50s, there was no hotter dance team than Marge Champion and her second husband, Gower Champion. The diminutive Marge and the tall, lanky Gower waltzed across the stages of nightclubs and theaters and starred on TV and in several MGM movie musicals, including "Show Boat" and "Lovely to Look At." The graceful performers not only were superb craftsmen, they also wove a story with each of their impeccable routines. Champion 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. "Snow White" had an "extraordinary" influence on her life "as well as giving me a chance to be part of animated history. Having that over-the-top training by the time I was 18, I wanted to take real theater training. I went to Maria Ouspenskaya [who starred in "The Wolf Man"], who was on Vine Street. I studied with her for a year. We had a rather interesting group of people," including one woman who was a stripper. "She had her own reasons for wanting to be an actress," Champion says, laughing. "I had mine. I would have done anything to become an actress." And she did. "It all came out in my dancing. Gower and I always told stories. I could never have done leading dance scenes unless I had studied acting."
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