Marge Champion, who served as the real-life model for Snow White, has died aged 101.
She partnered her husband Gower Champion in several MGM musicals and won an Emmy for 'Queen of the Stardust Ballroom'.
Marge starred in classics like Show Boat and also enjoyed a stellar Broadway career.
Her passing was announced by dance instructor Pierre Dulaine, who told The Hollywood Reporter that she died on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Marge's father was famed Hollywood dance and ballet teacher Ernest Belcher and he was friends with Walt Disney.
Ahead of its release in 1937, the animation team for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wanted to study the movement of real-life people on a soundstage, so that that they could accurately portray it on screen.
The ground-breaking animation needed a heroine and at 14 years of age, Marge was chosen to perform for them for two days a month for two years, earning her $10 a day.
Marge said in a 1998 interview with the Archive of American Television: "None of them had been a young girl or knew how a dress would do this or that or the other thing.
"Most of the animators [before then] took their characters … out of themselves."
As well as modelling Snow White, Marge also danced a part as the dwarf Dopey.
She went on to model for a number of other Disney animations as the studio ramped up its output in the early 1940's.
Marge was the model for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940), Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia (1940) and Mr Stock in Dumbo (1941).
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