The Stage

Evelyn Dall

Published Monday 17 May 2010 at 10:45 by Richard Anthony Baker

The vivacious, curvaceous singer, dancer and actress Evelyn Dall enjoyed her best years in Britain, where she sang with one of the best dance bands of the day, led by Bert Ambrose, starred in stage shows with Arthur Askey and made a number of movies with an array of variety stars. Dall was billed as England’s Original Blonde Bombshell, although she was, in fact, American.

Born Evelyn Mildred Fuss in the Bronx on January 8, 1918, she began her career at the age of 15 as part of a vaudeville act, Fields, Martin and Dall, who portrayed a group of eccentric ballroom dancers. The following year, she appeared in Billy Rose’s Revue at the Casino de Paris in New York and then in the Monte Carlo Follies, a show that was rapturously received at the Grosvenor Hotel in London.

Her life changed in 1935 when she received a telegram from Ambrose, who unexpectedly required a singer. She decided to return to London and, on the day after her arrival, she was singing with Ambrose at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. The following year, she married the band’s manager, Albert Holmes, so that she could continue working in Britain. She was by then having an affair with Ambrose, who was married with children.

The best of her early movies were little more than filmed variety bills, Soft Lights and Sweet Music (1936) with Harry Tate, Billy Bennett and the Western Brothers, Calling All Stars (1937) with Elisabeth Welch, Larry Adler and Turner Layton, and Sing as You Swing (also 1937), hosted by Clapham and Dwyer. Her most popular film was probably Time Flies (1943), in which she and the wartime ITMA star, Tommy Handley, were transported back to Elizabethan times.

On stage, she starred with Askey in Present Arms (1940), in which she sang a duet with Max Wall, and Follow the Girls (1945). At the London Coliseum in 1944, she played the role created on Broadway by Ethel Merman in Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys.

In 1946, Dall returned to America, apparently upset that Ambrose refused to divorce his wife and marry her. She remarried in 1947, had two children and retired from showbusiness. She died in Arizona on March 10, aged 92.