Ebsen, Buddy (2 Apr. 1908-6 July 2003), actor and dancer on stage, screen, and television, was born Christian Rudolph Ebsen Jr. in Belleville, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis, the son of Christian Ebsen Sr. and Franciska "Frances" Wendt Ebsen, dancing teachers. His parents were immigrants from central Europe. In 1918 the family moved to Orlando, Florida, where Ebsen's father opened a dancing school. Buddy (his nickname from childhood) was tall and athletically inclined, enjoying especially sailing and swimming. He was formally trained to dance by his father and was obliged to work as an instructor in the family business. In his autobiography Ebsen recalls feeling embarrassed by his talent at what he considered a "sissy" activity. Intending to become a physician, he enrolled at Rollins College in 1927 and transferred to the University of Florida as a sophomore. However, the collapse of the post-World War I Florida land boom in 1928 bankrupted his father, forcing Ebsen to withdraw from school.

Ebsen went to New York City that summer, hoping to earn money as a dancer and return to college. "I arrived in New York with $26.25 in my pocket and a letter of introduction to a friend of a friend's cousin," he said (Thomas). Standing 6 feet, 3 inches, his height was a disadvantage in auditions for Broadway chorus parts, but after several months--and dozens of tryouts at open calls--he was offered a role in Whoopee, a Florenz Ziegfeld production starring Eddie Cantor. When the show's choreographer complained about matching him with a partner of suitable height, Ebsen suggested his sister Vilma, and she was hired as well. Whoopee opened on Broadway in December 1928 and ran for more than eighteen months, establishing the brother-sister duo as a name act. They continued to perform together, winning bookings at nightclubs and on the vaudeville circuits. Buddy Ebsen's specialty was "eccentric dancing," solo performances combining clownish mimicry with unexpected virtuoso athletic movements. Dubbed by critics "the poor man's Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers," the Ebsens returned to the Broadway stage in Flying Colors (1932) and The Ziegfeld Follies of 1934.

Hollywood beckoned. The film studios had made the transition from silent to sound production during the early 1930s, and the movie musical had emerged as one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the studio most heavily invested in the genre, brought the Ebsens west for a screen test in 1935 and cast them in Broadway Melody of 1936. Offers of more film work followed, but Vilma Ebsen decided to leave show business to accept a marriage proposal. Buddy Ebsen relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a film career as an actor and dancer.

Ebsen's unaffected, "folksy" manner, supported by extraordinary technical skills as a dancer, put him much in demand in Hollywood. As the son of a dancing teacher who owned a dancing school, Ebsen had knowledge of and was practiced in an extraordinary number of dance styles and dance steps. His athletic abilities allowed him to perform many technically difficult virtuoso movements, such as splits and lifts. During 1936, his first year as a single, he appeared in Banjo on My Knee, behind Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea; Born to Dance, behind Eleanor Powell and Jimmy Stewart; and Captain January, as the dancing partner of the child star Shirley Temple. He was paired with Judy Garland on the dance floor in Broadway Melody of 1938.

Two unfortunate incidents during 1938 aborted what seemed like a meteoric rise to Hollywood stardom. Chosen to play the Scarecrow in the first casting of The Wizard of Oz, Ebsen was persuaded, before shooting began, to exchange roles with the more experienced Ray Bolger, who had taken the role of the Tin Woodsman. Early in the shooting schedule, Ebsen fell seriously ill because, it was learned, of an allergy to the aluminum-based paint used in the Woodsman's costume. Hospitalized, he was withdrawn from the cast of what became one of the biggest hits in film history.

A confrontation with the MGM chief Louis B. Mayer had longer-lasting consequences. Mayer offered Ebsen a seven-year contract worth more than $100,000 a year, an offer whose value is best understood in the context of its era, the Great Depression. Ebsen, however, refused to agree to MGM's standard exclusivity clause, telling Mayer that he could not be "owned." Angry at the insult to him--and to the system by which he ran his business--Mayer told the actor he would not be able to work at MGM or any other Hollywood studio again.

Ebsen appeared in just three pictures during the 1940s, all for RKO, a studio owned by broadcasting interests not subject to Mayer's influence. Unrepentant, the actor returned to live performances, appearing in plays in New York and Chicago, and even persuaded Vilma to join him for a reunion nightclub tour. In 1942 Ebsen was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard, and he served during World War II on the USS Pocatello, a submarine chaser stationed in Alaska.

Upon his discharge in 1946, Ebsen found Mayer's blackball still in force at the major studios. A friend who knew of Ebsen's abilities on horseback was able to get him a two-year contract with Republic Pictures on the condition that he perform his own stunts. Ebsen returned to the screen in 1950 for the first time in eight years, appearing as sidekick to the western star Rex Allen in five cowboy pictures, each sixty-seven minutes long, intended for Saturday afternoon audiences. His contract was not renewed.

Television revived Ebsen's career. Controlled in its early years by the radio broadcasting companies in New York, television production was not subject to Mayer's vendettas. Ebsen found roles on prime-time dramatic anthology series, including Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Stars over Hollywood, and Broadway Television Theatre. Walt Disney, the first film studio head to make a direct production deal with a television network, gave Ebsen a break that reestablished him in the top ranks of the entertainment industry. A longtime admirer of Ebsen, Disney had used him as a human model for dance movements in the early development of animatronic robots during the late 1940s. In 1954 he offered Ebsen the role of George Russel, best friend and sidekick of Davy Crockett, in a series of telefilms about the legendary American frontiersman. In an innovative distribution deal, the Davy Crockett films were first presented as one-hour episodes on Disneyland, a prime-time ABC television series, and later were recut for release to theaters as feature films, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1954) and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956). An early example of the power of media product tie-ins, Disney's "Davy Crockett" became a national marketing phenomenon, with sales of licensed coonskin caps, toys, comic books, and records in the millions.

Now a "household name," Ebsen had his pick of guest-starring roles on television. He took roles in prestigious dramatic series, including Desilu Playhouse, Playhouse 90, and The Twilight Zone, as well as top-rated western series, such as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide. With Mayer's Hollywood now mostly a memory, he appeared in studio features, notably Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), in which he played a Texas veterinarian abandoned by his expatriate wife (Audrey Hepburn).

In 1961 the television producer Paul Henning offered Ebsen a starring role in a new CBS situation comedy, The Beverly Hillbillies. Though Ebsen enjoyed the controlled work schedule of television guest appearances, he could not resist a starring role, something that had eluded him in Hollywood. The Beverly Hillbillies began a nine-season production run in 1962. According to the Nielsen ratings, it was the most popular television program of the 1960s, with weekly episodes drawing audiences projected at more than thirty-five million viewers. Ebsen, in the role of Jed Clampett, plays a naive but morally upright backwoods mountaineer who strikes it rich in oil and moves his family to the morally decrepit glitz of Beverly Hills. It was broad slapstick, with Ebsen playing straight man to an ensemble cast of comics.

The Beverly Hillbillies brought Ebsen a personal fortune he could hardly have expected a decade earlier. He built a "dream house" on Balboa Island, off the Southern California coast near Newport Beach, and purchased a ranch in the Agoura Hills. His love of sailing led him to start a boatbuilding company, specializing in the construction of catamarans, which he enjoyed racing. He opened a dancing school and brought in his sister Vilma to run it.

An avid guitar player, Ebsen wrote or cowrote dozens of songs, including "Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead," the theme song to the Davy Crockett series. He also penned several plays, including The Champagne General, which was produced at the Altadena Playhouse in 1964, with Ebsen in the role of Abraham Lincoln. His hobbies included seascape painting and Civil War history. An early supporter of Ronald Reagan, he was active in Republican Party politics. When The Beverly Hillbillies went out of production in 1971, few expected him to take on the burdens of another television series. However, less than two years later Ebsen returned to television as the title character in Barnaby Jones, a private detective series for CBS. Panned by the critics, the show was a popular hit nonetheless, running for seven years in prime time, largely on the strength of Ebsen's personal popularity. Older viewers, a large segment of the show's audience, enjoyed seeing Ebsen as a crafty octogenarian sleuth who regularly outwitted younger criminals.

Ebsen married three times. In 1933 he married Ruth Cambridge, then secretary to the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. The couple had two daughters. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943. In 1946 Ebsen married Nancy Wolcott, whom he met while both were serving as Coast Guard officers. They had five children. Wolcott died in 1982. In 1985 Ebsen married Dorothy Knott, who survived him. With advancing age, Ebsen moved from his Balboa Island home to a house overlooking the Pacific in Palos Verdes Estates. He died of respiratory failure in Torrance, California.

David Marc's 1996 interview with Paul Henning, who discusses his casting of Ebsen in The Beverly Hillbillies, is in the Syracuse University Library Television History Collection. Ebsen's The Other Side of Oz, ed. Stephen Cox (1993), is a fan-oriented autobiography. Ebsen's knowledge and lifelong love of sailing are evident in his Polynesian Concept (1972), a book about his catamaran cowritten with George A. Gunston. Critical analysis of The Beverly Hillbillies, with attention to Ebsen's comic style, is in chapter 2 of David Marc's Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (1996). Bob Thomas wrote an extensive obituary reviewing Ebsen's life and career for the Associated Press, 7 July 2003, available at Legacy.com, http://www.legacy.com/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=1142882. Other informative obituaries are in the New York Times, 8 July 2003, and the London Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2003.