The woman who modeled for Disney’s Snow White has passed away at the age of 101. Marge Champion was 14 when she showed artists how to move the main character of the groundbreaking animation.
Champion played all kinds of scenes from the film so that the artists could accurately reproduce her movements and posture. Film recordings were made of the performances and accurately traced as reference material for natural movements. Champion thus became the primal mother of all Disney princesses.
The method gave the first full-length cartoon a strikingly realistic look. Until then, cartoon characters were much more cartoonish, like Betty Boob or Mickey Mouse. With this new development, the cartoon was suddenly taken seriously: Disney received a special honorary Oscar for it, a big one and seven little ones.
Dance career
Champion had been discovered by a Disney talent hunter while in a class with her father, who was a dance teacher in Hollywood. She was chosen from 300 girls to act out the title role. She was paid ten dollars a day to visit for a few days every month. Disney was allowed to call them ‘Uncle Walt’.
On a brightly lit stage, Champion danced, sang and ran, sometimes accompanied by actors who played the dwarfs. “When Snow White had to run through a forest terrified, they hung ropes on a clothesline so that I could push it aside. When I had to kneel by a crib there was a camp bed. It was all very simple.”
The year the film premiered, at the age of 17, Champion married one of the animators, Art Babbitt, 12 years his senior. The marriage ended a few years later because Babbitt wanted to start a family, but Champion wanted to work on her dance career.
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