Evelyn Dall born 8 January 1916

Evelyn Dall (January 8, 1918 – March 10, 2010) was an American singer and actress who was known as England's "Original Blonde Bombshell".

Evelyn Dall was born Evelyn Mildred Fuss in New York's Bronx, on January 8, 1918. The elder of two children, she left school aged 15, and began her career on the vaudeville circuit. In 1935, she starred in Billy Rose's revue show at the Casino de Paris in New York, then Chicago, before eventually moving to London with the Monte Carlo Follies.

While performing back in New York, Evelyn Dall then received a telegram from Bert Ambrose, who had seen her in the London version of the Follies and who unexpectedly required a singer for his British tour. Dall accepted the offer, and, within a day of her arrival, was performing at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. Already in love with London she became a self-confessed Anglophile from the moment she arrived.

Dall made her first recording with Ambrose in September 1935, and the following year recorded the infectious "Organ Grinder's Swing", which became one of her signature numbers. In 1936 she married Ambrose's manager, Albert Holmes. The marriage was a stormy one, as for several months she had been having an affair with Ambrose himself. He was already married with two young children. The British tabloids also linked her to Victor de Rothschild, the scientist whose name was later linked to the Cambridge spy ring. Her marriage to Holmes lasted just over a year.

Away from the stage, Evelyn Dall enjoyed a fruitful film career as the female lead in a series of lightweight musical revues including Soft Lights and Sweet Music (1936), Calling All Stars (1937), and as Cora Fane in Sing As You Swing (1938).

In 1938 Evelyn Dall performed at the Royal Derby Night Ball at Buckingham Palace, singing Gershwin's Nice Work If You Can Get It to more than 1,000 invited guests. In the same year The Daily Telegraph reported that she was earning as much as £200 per week.

During the war years she appeared in as many as five shows across Britain every week, returning to London to record the radio show Calling All Stars each Friday. By the mid
1940s her film career was on the wane, and following a handful of minor roles, including that of Suzanne in He Found a Star (1941), and Miss London Ltd (1943) opposite Arthur Askey, she retired. Her final film, Time Flies (1944) co-starring Tommy Handley as a music hall star who uses a professor's time machine to return to Elizabethan England, was her most memorable.

After the war she had become increasingly unhappy with her private life – Bert Ambrose had refused to divorce his wife – and Evelyn Dall decided to return to America. In October 1946 she sailed in the Queen Elizabeth with Bobby Cohen, a former GI she had met in London some months before. In New York, she picked up some radio work and met a friend of Cohen's, Sam Winter, whom she married in 1947.


Widowed in 1974, Dall moved to Jupiter, Florida in 1980, then to Arizona in 2002. Around 2006 she developed Alzheimer's. Her health gradually deteriorated and she passed away on 10 March 2010 aged 92.  (Info edited mainly from the Telegraph.co.uk obit)

Excerpts from the UK 1941 feature film "He Found A Star"