Inga Andersen

Inga was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina but moved with her parents to Prince George, British Columbia in 1912. Her father, A.P. Andersen, was a builder/contractor who owned a lumber yard). Inga learned to dance from a postal course, “How to dance in Fifteen Lessons”, and by age 15 was had opened up the “Inga Andersen School of the Dance”, teaching local girls and boys dance. Every summer, she travelled to dance schools, first in Vancouver and Seattle, then Detroit, Pittsburg and New York. In 1930, she was hired as a dance instructor at the Albertina Rasch school in Los Angeles, toured the U.S. with a troupe, joined the Ziegfeld Follies for a time and went to England in 1932 to play in “Wild Violets” that ran on Drury Lane for 9 months. She next appeared in “Jack and Jill”, took “Wild Violets” to South Africa, returned to England to play in “Jack o’ Diamonds” and “Jack and Jill”. She was a regular on the cabaret circuit in London and entertained Allied troops during WW2 in the U.K., Europe and Italy. After the war, she worked in New York and L.A, and in the early 1950s, in Montreal, Quebec.