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• Buddy and Vilma Ebsen

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1908-2003
Birth Date: Apr 2, 1908
Death Date: Jul 6, 2003

Place of Birth: Belleville, Illinois
Place of Death: Torance, California

Buddy Ebson (April 2, 1908, Belleville, Illinois - July 6, 2003, Torrance, California),tap dancer and actor who performed for over seven decades on stage and film, was born Christian Rudolph Ebsen, Jr. His father was a ballet dancer who trained in the Danish school of ballet, a style that that emphasized pantomime and character dancing. When his family moved to Orlando, Florida in 1920, he and his sisters learned to dance at a dance studio his father operated in Orlando. During a summer-long vacation in the Appalachians of western, North Carolina, Buddy and his sister Vilma (1911, Belleville, Illinois-March 12, 2007, Thousand Oaks, California) still in their teens, were hired by Arthur Murray to dance at tea time at the Grove Park Inn in Ashville, where the future famous ballroom dance teacher was the social director. After two brief enrollments at the University of Florida in Gainesville and Rollins College in Winter Park, he left Orlando in 1928, at age twenty, to try his luck as a dancer in New York.

Ebsen and his sister Vilma, a petite and quirky dancer who countered her brother's rag-doll style by dancing in counterpoint, performed as a dance act in supper clubs and in vaudeville, billing themselves as "The Baby Astaires." On Broadway they appeared as members of the chorus in Whoopee, Flying Colors, and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. A rave review from Walter Winchell, who saw them perform in Atlantic City, led to a booking at the Palace Theater, the pinnacle of the vaudeville world.

In 1935 the Ebsens were signed to a two-year contract by MGM where they made their film debut in Broadway Melody of 1936, sharing a charming tenement rooftop dance sequence with Eleanor Powell. In 1943 when Vilma retired from show business, later to co-own with her sister Helga, the Ebsen School of Dance in Palisades, Buddy continued his film career. He danced with Eleanor Powell in Born to Dance; Shirley Temple in Captain January, and Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938. Ebsen was noted for his loose-legged and eccentric style of tap dancing, which may be the reason why Walt Disney chose him to be filmed dancing in front of a grid as an aid to animating Mickey Mouse's dancing in Disney's Silly Symphonies. In 1939, his eccentric comedic style of dancing served him well when cast as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

As one reviewer commented about Buddy and Vilma's dancing, "The Ebsens don't dance, it's spontaneous combustion." As Vilma commented to Rusty Frank, "It had a lot of wholesome energy. No gimmicks. Nothing trite in our dancing. Because we danced like nobody else."

[Source: Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman, Donald McNeilly, Vaudeville Old and New (2007); Rusty Frank, Tap!: the greatest tap dance stars and their stories 1900-1955 (1990)]