Marjorie Belcher is a born champion as well as a married one. With the surname and partnership of her second husband, she became – and remains – one of the best-known dancers in all of show business, a reputation that keeps her warm and radiant now that she’s something of a cockeyed octogenarian.

“It’s been an extraordinary life,” Marge Champion, as she is known professionally, is quick to admit. A lot of those 85 years flickered by earlier this week during a salute to her at Film Forum. That theater’s top dog, Bruce Goldstein, assembled some choice clips, and the honoree herself added some special ammo.

To many, she lingers in a kind of Technicolor mist, partnered with her then-husband Gower Champion in the musical extravaganzas they made at MGM in the first half of the 1950s. They began with a Bing Crosby vehicle at Paramount (“Mr. Music”) and ended with a Betty Grable one at Columbia (“Three for the Show”), but their true glory days were at MGM – five musicals in four years (“Show Boat,” “Lovely To Look At,” “Everything I Have Is Yours,” “Give a Girl a Break,” “Jupiter’s Darling”) – enough to build a dream on.

Before she was a Champion, she was making screen history at ages 14 through 16. Twice a month for two years, for the paltry sum of $10 a day, she was chauffeured to the Disney lot where she’d perform for 16 mm cameras the role of Snow White, supported by an in-house collection of animators passing for dwarfs. “They got all of the dwarfs and animals out of themselves, but they couldn’t get this young girl. The way her skirt swirled around her when she twirled with the dwarfs was beyond them so they showed me storyboards and photographed me. I did everything Snow White does on the screen, except the singing – Adriana Caselotti did that – and a lot that never got to the screen.”

So effective was she as a model for the animators they had her back to do the blue fairy in “Pinocchio” and the balletic hippo in “Fantasia.” “I had learned the technique of working with them and giving them all sorts of options so they could make the drawings realistic.”

A fluid, graceful line came naturally to her. Her father was Ernest Belcher, “Dean of the West Coast Dance Masters.” He put Mae Murray and John Gilbert through “The Merry Widow Waltz” for Erich von Stroheim, and his students included Cyd Charisse and Gwen Verdon. “He had a very large school as I was growing up – first in downtown Los Angeles, then on Western Avenue. C.B. DeMille built the new building for my father and gave him a 99-year lease. I have a picture of myself at age 11 with C.B. at the dedication, with my foot on the spade. The building is still there, and on the top floor is a ballroom studio that my father designed. The first two floors of that school are where I grew up.”

Inevitably, she was a star pupil at her father’s dance school and, in no time at all, his assistant. When he had to choreograph for Shirley Temple, Ms. Champion accompanied him on the house call and demonstrated the steps the child star was expected to execute.

She met Gower Champion in the ninth grade. In their alphabetically arranged classroom, he sat directly behind her. “We always had this argument. He said it was an art class, and I said it was a history class. I don’t remember ever taking an art class.”

For her first in-the-flesh, nonanimated film appearance, she went slumming and played a conventional horse-opera heroine in calico in “Honor of the West,” a quickie shoot-’emup she did under the name of Marjorie Bell. “I was 17 years old, so what did I know?” she shrugs. “The hero, Bob Baker, was a singing cowboy who was supposed to be in competition at the time with Gene Autry.” (Needless to add, Autry slept easy.)

Considering that the Champions subsequently became the second best-known dance couple in films, it was prophetic that she broke into the major-studio league with an Astaire and Rogers vehicle about another earlier famous dance team, “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,” at RKO. “I was one of Ginger’s friends when she went to the theater to see Fred for the first time. I was in the box with her, and I think I had one line.”

Years later, when a successful supper-club gig at the Mocambo on Sunset Strip got them the big Hollywood rush, Howard Hughes put in an aggressive bid to bring them to RKO, promising them remake rights to all the old Astaire and Rogers films. The Champions wisely ducked the offer – and the comparison – going instead for the full glitz of MGM.

A vaudeville turn with The three Stooges got Ms. Champion to New York in 1939, and she started doing Broadway musicals (among them, “What’s Up?” which was choreographed by George Balanchine, whom she briefly dated). Gower Champion re-entered the picture in 1945, back from the service, when she was starring in “Dark of the Moon” on Broadway.

“We sorta started a very light-headed romance, but he was signed by MGM and went to California for a year. During that time, he did ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ with Cyd Charisse in ‘Till the Clouds Roll By,’ but it was cut down to 20 bars. Less than five years later, we did it in ‘Lovely To Look At,’ and it became one of our signature numbers.”

In 1949, they did some pioneering TV, co-starring in “The Admiral Broadway Revue” with a pair en route to “Your Show of Shows” – Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. After her 1973 divorce from Mr. Champion, she returned to TV as her own woman – and her own choreographer – and earned an Emmy for “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.”

Now, Ms. Champion lives in Stockbridge, Mass., and at Manhattan Plaza, surrounding herself with friends in both locations. One of these, acting guru Sondra Lee, who has known Ms. Champion since her “Hello, Dolly!” days 40 years ago, said she “is the antidote for a million divas. She has mastered the art of growing old more than anyone else I have ever met. She celebrates her age. She’s not discreet about it. She’s not covert about it. She’s just joyous about it. And I love her passion for dance. Twice a week, she and Donald Saddler [the choreographer who was her dance-partner husband in the 2001 revival of “Follies”] rent a studio, and they just dance – not for a gig or anything, just for the pleasure of it.”