Born Christian Ludolf Ipsen Jr. on April 2, 1908, in Belleville, Illinois, Buddy Ebsen grew up in a family of dance instructors. He was one of four children, the only son of Christian Ipsen and Francesca Ipsen, both of whom taught dance. The family lived near St.

Louis until Buddy was ten, then moved to Orlando, Florida, where his parents opened a dance school. Trained by his father in ballroom dancing, he grew tall enough to partner adult women by his early teens. At fifteen, he stood six feet and worked as a dance instructor in the family business. In 1926, Ebsen enrolled at Rollins College in nearby Winter Park, Florida, intending to prepare for medical school.

But his father, who had invested heavily in Florida real estate, suffered severe financial losses. Ebsen transferred to the University of Florida as a sophomore to take advantage of lower tuition at the state school. A catastrophic collapse in Florida land prices bankrupted the family, and Ebsen was forced to leave college in the spring of 1928. With dancing as his only marketable skill, Ebsen went to New York City, hoping to earn money and return to his studies.

He quickly discovered that his height, now six feet three inches, disqualified him from most dancing roles in Broadway musicals. After months of auditions, he was offered a part in Florenz Ziegfeld’s production of Whoopee, on the condition that he find a suitably tall partner. Ebsen brought his sister Vilma to audition, and the pair were hired. The show, starring Eddie Cantor, was a hit, and the Ebsens proved popular with Broadway audiences during an eighteen-month run.

By 1930, the brother-and-sister act had become sought-after performers. They appeared in nightclubs, toured in vaudeville, and took part in several Broadway productions, including Flying Colors in 1932 and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. With the nation suffering through the Depression, Ebsen abandoned any thoughts of returning to school and committed fully to a career in show business. In 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer invited Ebsen and his sister to screen test in Hollywood.

They were selected to appear in the 1936 film Broadway Melody, their first movie appearance. Then Vilma Ebsen decided to leave the entertainment world to marry. Although there were offers of stage work in New York, Ebsen chose to stay in Los Angeles and redirect his focus to films. Louis B.

Mayer was impressed by Ebsen’s natural, spontaneous screen presence and the range of his dancing skills. Mayer supported placing Ebsen on a fast track. Despite his limited experience, Ebsen was cast in two other major releases in 1936, Banjo on My Knee and Born to Dance. He was loaned to Twentieth Century-Fox to serve as the dancing partner of child star Shirley Temple in Captain January that same year.

He later appeared as Judy Garland’s dancing partner in Broadway Melody of 1938. Had he not been allergic to the aluminum particles in his costume, he would have played the Tin Man opposite Garland in The Wizard of Oz in 1939. In 1938, Mayer personally offered Ebsen more than one hundred thousand dollars a year to become a contract player at MGM. The actor stunned the studio head by refusing the offer because of the contract’s strict exclusivity clause.

Ebsen’s rising film career came to an abrupt halt. He traveled east on two occasions for stage musicals, Yokel Boy in New York in 1939 and Good Night Ladies in Chicago in 1942. His friend, director Leslie Goodwins, hired him for two pictures at RKO in 1941, Parachute Battalion and They Met in Argentina, which paved the way for a third film at the studio, Sing Your Worries Away, in 1942. But exactly as Mayer had predicted, the other studios stopped returning his calls.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ebsen, a lifelong experienced sailor, joined the United States Coast Guard. He was commissioned as a lieutenant and sent to Alaska, where he served aboard the USS Pocatello, a submarine chaser patrolling the Alaskan coast. After the war, Ebsen returned to Los Angeles. Finding himself unwanted by the major studios, he traveled east for several stage productions and considered moving to New York to return to theater work full time.

In 1950, nearly eight years after his last film, Republic Pictures, a small production company, signed him to appear as a sidekick to cowboy Rex Allen in a series of short comedic westerns aimed at Saturday afternoon audiences. Having previously shared the screen with stars like Judy Garland, Jimmy Stewart, and Barbara Stanwyck, Ebsen reached the lowest point of his film career in 1951 when Republic declined to renew his contract. His major breakthrough came when Walt Disney offered him the role of George Russel, the companion of the title character in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. The production was a massive success in both film and television, and Ebsen reprised his role in the sequel, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.

He achieved a level of public fame he had never known, even at the height of his earlier film career. By the late 1950s, Ebsen was picking and choosing guest starring roles on popular television series. He was in high demand for westerns, appearing in more than a dozen of them, including Bonanza, Rawhide, and Have Gun – Will Travel. He even found a welcome return to the film community, appearing in major studio productions such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961 and The Interns in 1962.

In 1961, producer Paul Henning approached Ebsen to star in a new comedy series for CBS called The Beverly Hillbillies. Though Ebsen had little experience in the broad style of comedy Henning planned, and had never before headed the cast of any film or series, he could not resist the chance to finally take a leading role. He was to play Jed Clampett, an Ozark mountain man who strikes oil and moves his family to a mansion in Beverly Hills, California. While much of the show’s humor came from the rural characters’ simplicity, Ebsen enjoyed the frequent satire of the greed and lack of moral conscience displayed by the urban characters.

The series premiered in 1962 and remained in production on CBS for nine seasons. According to Nielsen ratings, it was the most popular show on American television during the 1960s. When the series ended in 1971, it was generally assumed that Ebsen would retire. Instead, he delighted his many fans by returning to television in 1973 in Barnaby Jones, a very different kind of prime-time series.

As the title character, Ebsen played a retired private detective who comes back to investigate the death of his son. After proving to himself that he could still do the work better than most people despite his age, he returns to the job full time. Ebsen’s aging fan base enjoyed watching him outsmart overconfident younger criminals, and the show was a major ratings success, remaining in prime time through the end of the 1979-1980 season. Once again, it was believed that Ebsen had made his last television series appearance.

But during the 1984-1985 season, he appeared in a recurring role on another private investigation series, Matt Houston, playing the uncle of the main character. During the last three decades of his life, Ebsen was one of the wealthiest actors in Hollywood. He moved into a home of his own design on an island off the coast of Southern California, where he pursued a remarkable range of hobbies and interests. He raced his boat, Polynesian Concept, a catamaran of world-class standard, in international competitions.

A skilled guitarist, he composed or co-wrote more than eighty published songs over the years. Two of his plays, The Champagne General and John Honest, were produced professionally. He enjoyed painting seascapes and natural scenery, and began writing novels after he turned ninety, publishing his first, Kelly’s Quest: A Love Story, in 2000. In his personal life, Ebsen’s first wife was Ruth Cambridge, whom he married in 1933 and with whom he had two children.

That marriage ended in divorce in 1943. He later married Nancy Wolcott, a fellow Coast Guard officer he met during service, on September 6, 1945. The couple had five children and divorced in 1985. Ebsen married Dorothy Knott in 1985, when he was seventy-seven.

In the spring of 2003, Ebsen complained of breathing problems and was taken to Torrance Memorial Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. On July 6, 2003, Buddy Ebsen died in the hospital of respiratory failure. He was ninety-five years old.