Dancer Vilma Ebsen, Buddy's sister, dies

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., March 20 (UPI) -- Vilma Ebsen, a dancer who performed on stage and in film with her brother, Buddy, died in her sleep at a Thousand Oaks, Calif., care home at the age of 96.

Ebsen was performing in a club in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1930 when she danced on stage one night with her brother. In the audience was columnist Walter Winchell, whose one-paragraph review in the New York Daily Mirror propelled brother and sister into show business, The Los Angeles Times said.

The brother-sister team was featured in a vaudeville revue and several Broadway musicals, including the 1943 version of "Ziegfield Follies."

In Hollywood, they danced together in only one film, "Broadway Melody of 1936." After that, she returned to New York to be with her husband, Robert Emmett Dolan, a Broadway conductor whom she later divorced, the Times said.

Returning to California in the early 1940s, Ebsen and a sister, Helga, started the Ebsen School of Dancing in Pacific Palisades, which operated until the mid-1990s.

Ebsen also was a swimmer and was a Florida state champion in the breaststroke in 1927.

Ebsen, who died March 12, is survived by two sons, two granddaughters and four great-grandchildren.