Marge Champion, The Original Snow White: 100 Years of Disney Blogathon

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs really changed the animation game when it premiered in 1937. Not only was it Disney’s first feature length animated movie, it was the first feature length animated movie period.

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And at the heart of it was Marge Champion, a 14-year-old dancer hired by Walt Disney Studios to be the dance model for Snow White.

This is my post for the 100 Years of Disney Blogathon hosted by the gals at Silver Scene. Make sure you visit their blog to see all of the great posts over the weekend!

Today we’re talking Marge Champion.

Am I overstating things by saying that there would be no Snow White without her? Probably, because Disney would’ve just hired another dancer; but you can’t talk about what a success it was, what an innovation it was, animation-wise, without thanking Marge Champion. So in a way, the everlasting success of Walt Disney Animation Studios wouldn’t be what it is without her.

(Tell me in the comments if I’m ‘stanning’ too much, but she deserves it.)

Marge Champion was a 13-year-old dancer when a talent scout for Disney came knocking at her father’s dance studio looking for a live action model for Snow White.

As Marge told it in a 1998 interview with the Television Academy (full interview here), many, many girls at Ernest Belcher’s dance school auditioned for the role before the pool was whittled down to three dancers for a final audition. Marge was one of them, and said that the final audition, “really consisted of seeing, on 16mm film, how free we were. I thought it was a neat idea…they’d tell me what they wanted me to do or show me a storyboard, and then just turn me loose.”

And this was before the days of iron-clad NDAs precluding people from talking about their super-secret projects. Marge said that Disney told her from the start that she was auditioning for Snow White because they figured they would’ve been told the fairytale growing up.

Some ‘girl math’ may be at play in Marge’s retelling because she said she was 13 when she auditioned and 14 when she was hired (which would put the timeline at after September 1933); but according to the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Wikipedia page, Walt only committed to making the movie in 1934, and the script was finished that fall.

Marge also recalled that the voice recordings were completed by the time she came on board, and that she had Andrea Caselotti’s recordings as reference when she came in to work. But again, according to the Wikipedia page, Andrea was only hired in 1935 and recorded her lines in chunks over a period of two years.

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Keep in mind that memory may have been a factor, as Marge was telling the story 61 years after the fact in that interview. There could also be good ole fashioned ‘shaving years off your age’ at play, too. Whether the events happened exactly when Marge recalled them doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, I’m just pointing them out for context.

The whole reason why Disney hired a live action reference model in the first place was that the animators didn’t have the first clue how to accurately animate a teenage girl. Marge said in the interview that all the animals are based on the animators, because they’d make faces into mirrors at their desks and then copy the movements onto paper. “None of them had been a young girl or knew how a dress would do this or that or the other thing,” she said.

Because of course all of the animators were men. Except for maybe the handful—and that might even be too generous of a number—of women who animated only backgrounds or did colour corrections on the pieces, all the animators who worked on Snow White (and a lot of Disney movies for a long time, let’s be honest) were men. Even the live action model for the evil witch was a man, but we’ll get into that later.

Marge’s turn as Snow White lasted for a period of, she says, two years. It wasn’t consistent daily work, she only worked maybe one or two days a month and was paid the princely sum of $10 per day, which is equivalent to $220.88 in today’s dollars.

And she did it all backwards and in—just kidding. But she did have a specially-designed Snow White dress and, for a spell, a cartoon helmet of Snow White’s face (as she explained in, it animation, heads are larger than bodies in a way that they aren’t on actual people, and the animators didn’t want to have to rescale their drawings). The helmet lasted a week before it caused problems for Marge, so they did away with it and just styled her hair like Snow White’s and put a ribbon in it.

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Marge thinks she might have even influenced Snow White’s facial design. Initial drawings, she said, showed Betty Boop-style eyes but they were swapped out for almond-shaped eyes, like Marge had. She also had the same nose as Snow White, and the same waistline. Snow White was apparently a waif at first but her waistline was changed to one more in line with Marge’s. The super trim waistline would return to Disney in Sleeping Beauty, where Princess Aurora’s design was influenced by the gamine Audrey Hepburn.

She only mentions two other live action reference models for Prince Charming and the Wicked Witch—the ‘well actually’ in me needs to point out that Disney’s official name for Snow White’s prince is ‘The Prince’ (Prince Charming is Cinderella’s fella).

The Prince’s model was Louis Hightower, and his IMDb trivia section states that he was chosen by Walt Disney because he had sturdy legs. Sitting here writing this, I can’t even visualize the Prince, let alone recall if his legs were sturdy.

Hightower was Marge’s dance partner, but sadly died in the D-Day Landings in Normandy during the Second World War. He’d been a pupil at Ernest Belcher’s dance studio, as had the Wicked Witch’s live action model: Paul Godkin.

Yup, another man in a woman’s role. Marge remembered him as big and burly with a large nose that they put a wart on. Anyways…

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Though she’s often referred to as a dance model when you Google her, Marge did just about every scene Snow White’s involved in on a specially-built soundstage that animators would flit in and out of as necessary.

She recalled one particular scene, of Snow White fleeing through the forest, as “They had a clothesline just strung up and they had all these big cords hanging down so that I’d have to brush them aside…they helped me some so that I wouldn’t have to pantomime everything.”

Other archival footage you can view on YouTube shows her dancing in the dwarfs’ cottage; and yet another shows her in a baggy trench coat so that she could mimic Dopey and Sneezy dancing on each others’ shoulders.

She was instructed by Disney to tell anyone who asked that she was Snow White’s live action model, and when the film premiered in December 1937, she was in the crowd.

Speaking about it 61 years later, Marge said, “I still get a kick out of seeing [Snow White] because it is funny to think that out of nowhere I got to be in one of the most legendary films and actually have some sort of impact on it.”

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Her work with Disney continued through to Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo. She was the live action model for The Blue Fairy (Pinocchio) and Mr. Stork (Dumbo), and modeled and choreographed for the Dancing Hippo in Fantasia.

Disney was in her life off-screen too, for a bit. She married animator Art Babbitt in 1937. He’s best remembered as the creator and animator for Goofy. On Snow White, he was the Evil Queen’s main animator. They divorced in 1940.

Marge would go on to enjoy a long career in film, dancing alongside husband and creative collaborator Gower Champion. She died at the age of 101 in 2020. 

Honestly, there's so much out there about the history of Snow White and Disney animation and how the character has evolved. I learned about JoAnn Dean Killingsworth while working on this and I'd love to do a post about her next. She was the first actress who played Snow White in a live action capacity at Disneyland. Stay tuned for that at some point! 

And now that you’ve reached the end of this post, here’s a confession: Snow White is my least favourite Disney Princess and I’m not much of a fan of the film, either. I just love Marge Champion.

My favourite princess? It’s a tie between Ariel and Belle, and while I love both of their movies, I think Beauty and the Beast edges out The Little Mermaid by a hair.

What’s your favourite Disney movie? And who’s your favourite Disney Princess? Let me know in the comments!