Marge Champion turned 100 yesterday.

So, you ask, “Who is Marge Champion?”

She and members of her family were some of the many brush strokes that composed the painting of early Hollywood.

She was born Marjorie Celeste Belcher on September 2, 1919 in Los Angeles, California. Her father was a Hollywood dance director who taught Shirley Temple, Betty Grable, Ramon Novarro, Cyd Charisse, Fay Wray and Joan Crawford, as well as her future husband Gower Champion.

Her older sister, Lina Basquette, was a silent film star and wife of producer Sam Wonsal, one of the four founders and the CEO of the Warner Brothers film studio.

Like her sister, Marjorie began dancing at an early age. By age twelve she had become a ballet instructor at her father’s studio. At age seventeen, she was married to Art Babbit, an animator at Disney (and the creator of Goofy), to whom she was married for three years.

She was hired by Walt Disney Studios as a dance model for their animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. Her movements were copied to enhance the realism of the Snow White character. She later served as the live-action model for the Blue Fairy in “Pinocchio” and the dancing hippopotamus in “Fantasia”, for the ballet parody she also helped to choreograph.

I happened to be watching the 1951 movie “Show Boat” a few days ago. She played Ellie May – one of the dancers on the Cotton Blossom. In the movie, she dances with and eventually marries Frank Schultz, who is played by her real-life husband Gower Champion.

The Champions were a dancing team throughout the 40s and 50s, performing in Hollywood musicals, Broadway productions and television variety shows. In the late ’50s, they had their own television show.

You can watch one of her many Show Boat dance numbers with her husband below.