Information

Full name: Marjorie Celeste Belcher
Birth: September 2, 1919 in Los Angeles, California
Death: October 21, 2020 in Los Angeles, California

Marriages:
Arthur Babbitt (August 8, 1937 – October 2, 1941)
Gower Carlisle Champion (October 5, 1947 – December 20, 1973)
Boris Sagal (January 1, 1977 – May 22, 1981)

Worked at the Disney studio between:
1935 – 1939

Job on Snow White:
Model for Snow White

Back to Snow White Models

To make rapid progress on the quality of animating realistic human beings, choreographer Ernest Belcher’s daughter, Marjorie, was hired around the fall of 1935 for her dancing skills to mime each scene for the camera, surrounded by props to represent the creatures or objects with which the Princess was supposed to interact.

She recalls that in the early days, to compensate for the fact that the character was caricatured with a head larger than her own, she had to wear a helmet that made her almost faint in the California heat. Her costume is designed to emphasize the contours and facilitate the tracing. She was given one with sequins for a public appearance at the Rose Festival (seen in the gallery below) while she was going by the name Marjorie Bell.

Although he does not mention her by name, it is probably her that Maurice Noble saw hanging from a rope over a swimming pool during the shooting of scene 21A, sequence 3A in the forest, which must have been quite uncomfortable.

Films from her shoots are featured on the Blu-ray of the film.

She works several non-consecutive days at the studios where she meets animator Art Babbitt whom she marries shortly after his work on Snow White. She is used again for the character of the blue fairy in Pinocchio, and in the sequence of The Dance of Hours in Fantasia.

But she will achieve fame with her new husband Gower Champion as Marge Champion in a series of films at MGM where the dancing duo performs in increasingly important roles until they reach the headline.

This Belgian article about the dancing duo was published in 1953.

Find her interview by David Johnson in his book and another in French by Jeremy Noyer in Interviews with an Empire. Meeting with Disney artists. I also recommend you read Mindy Aloff’s book, Hippo in a tutu: Dancing in Disney animation.

Video interview

For emmytvlegends.org, Marge gave an extensive interview available on video. I suggest you listen to her amazing life.