Marge Champion

Lore & Background

Champion began dancing at an early age under her father, dance director Ernest Belcher, who taught many Hollywood stars. At age twelve, she became a ballet instructor at his studio. She later modeled for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia, and helped choreograph the Dance of the Hours segment. After her marriage to Gower Champion, the two performed together as a dance team in MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, including Till the Clouds Roll By, Show Boat, and Everything I Have Is Yours. In the 1970s, Champion co-created creative worship services featuring dance and music at Bel Aire Presbyterian Church, and co-authored two books on liturgical arts. She also worked as a dialogue and movement coach for the TV miniseries The Awakening Land.

Reader's Guide

Champion's significance lies in her dual impact on animation and live performance. As a teenage dance model for Disney, she helped bring realism to iconic animated characters, though she received no screen credit due to Walt Disney's concern that audiences would assume animators simply copied her movements. Her later career as half of the Marge and Gower Champion dance team contributed to the golden age of MGM musicals. Beyond entertainment, she innovated in liturgical dance, co-authoring books and leading workshops that integrated dance into worship. Her longevity in the field—from modeling at age fourteen to appearing on Broadway at age eighty-one in Follies—demonstrates a career spanning nearly seven decades. Her legacy includes not only her performances but also her work as a choreographer and coach, influencing both stage and screen.

Did You Know?

• At age fourteen, Champion was hired as a dance model for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; her movements were copied to enhance the realism of the animated Snow White character.
• She modeled for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia, and helped choreograph the Dance of the Hours segment.
• Champion co-authored two books on liturgical dance, Catch the New Wind and God Is a Verb.

Early Training and the Disney Years

Her father, Ernest Belcher, was a dance director whose roster of students included future stars like Shirley Temple, Cyd Charisse, and Joan Crawford. Champion trained exclusively under him from age five, absorbing his meticulous approach to alignment, placement, and dynamic phrasing—principles she later credited with preserving her health across a decades-long career. By eleven, she had already debuted at the Hollywood Bowl in a ballet called Carnival in Venice, and by twelve she was teaching ballet at her father's studio. Her movements were traced to give the animated princess a sense of lived realism. She went on to model the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia's Dance of the Hours (which she also helped choreograph), and even contributed to Mr. Stork in Dumbo.

The Champion Couple on Screen and Television

After marrying Gower Champion—whom her father had also taught—Marge and Gower became one of Hollywood's most beloved dance duos. Their partnership carried them through a string of MGM musicals in the late 1940s and 1950s, including Till the Clouds Roll By, Show Boat, and Everything I Have Is Yours. MGM envisioned them as the Astaire-and-Rogers successors, but the couple declined to remake most of those classic films, completing only one, Lovely to Look At. Their chemistry and skill also made them natural television personalities.

Broadway and the Long Arc of Performance

Champion's stage career spanned more than four decades, a testament to her own observation that while a dancer's prime often ends around forty, an actress's life can stretch far beyond. Beyond the stage, she served as a dialogue and movement coach for the 1978 miniseries The Awakening Land, set in the late eighteenth-century Ohio Valley, and made a rare dramatic television appearance on Fame in 1982, playing a ballet teacher harboring racial bias.

Creative Worship and a Life of Purpose

In the 1970s, Champion channeled her creative instincts into a deeply personal project at Bel Aire Presbyterian Church in New York. Alongside actress Marilee Zdenek and choreographer John West, she designed innovative worship services that wove dance and music into liturgy, transforming the traditional church experience into something dynamic and embodied. The team's work resonated far beyond their congregation; they traveled nationwide offering workshops and liturgical arts programs that inspired other churches to explore movement as a form of spiritual expression. Champion and Zdenek codified their philosophy in two co-authored books, Catch the New Wind and God Is a Verb, which articulated the belief that physical expression could deepen faith in tangible ways. This period reflected a broader pattern in Champion's life: a refusal to let one discipline define her. From Disney animation to MGM musicals, from Broadway to television, from choreography to liturgical arts, she continually reinvented herself, drawing on the rigorous foundation her father had laid in her childhood studio in Los Angeles.