Nancy Abbate (June 19, 1942)
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The Quiet Redhead
The first-season girl with the red hair was primarily a dancer, ballet and tap, and seldom appeared by herself. She started as a Red Team member, featuring in the roll call every day for the early months of the show. Her most prominent solo was as the drum majorette for the Circus Day opening.
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Background
Nancy Lee Abbate was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of Tom and Dora Abbate. The younger of two children, her parents seemed to have encouraged her to develop her talents from an early age. Besides her dancing, she could also play piano, and had been acting in films since she was eight. Her first role was an extra part in Love is Better Than Ever, made in 1950 but not released until 1952. For a while she billed herself as "Nancy Abbott", but eventually returned to her own name.
The Farmer Takes A Wife |
She next appeared in the Betty Grable musical, The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), which also had Doreen Tracey. Just prior to the Mickey Mouse Club, she was in the Martin and Lewis comedy, Artists and Models (1955), with Sharon Baird.
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Artists & Models
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Nancy also did lots of television work, appearing on episodes of
The Ray Bolger Show,
The Stu Erwin Show,
The Jack Benny Show, and
The Donald O'Connor Show in the early to mid-fifties. As with Sharon and
Lonnie Burr, Nancy took a severe pay cut when she started working at the Disney Studio. However, the work was steady, and Nancy, now thirteen, was at the age when jobs for child performers became scarce.
Performance
Nancy was very photogenic and had strong dancing skills which put her into the forefront of performers when the early segments were filmed during May-July of 1955. She was paired with Sharon for tap numbers and Annette for specialties, and with Annette, Doreen, and Darlene for ballet. The best number for this quartet was Cooking With Minnie Mouse, a long ballet-swing piece that also featured Bobby Burgess.
Like the other performers, Nancy took her turn wearing animal costumes. She rode a "pony" for Talent Round-up Day, and during the opening for Anything Can Happen Day rode two different "elephants" and was stuck in a donkey costume for roll call (very bipartisan of Disney).
Nancy's singing ability is less certain, for she never seemed to sing solo. Her acting was good, and she particularly displayed a flair for facial expressions in reaction shots. Sometime during the second round of filming for the first season Nancy seems to have been moved to the Blue team. By late October 1955 she apparently had left the show. It may be that Nancy was the girl, mentioned in interviews by other Mouseketeers, who was let go due to parental misbehavior.
Aftermath
Nancy appears to have left television and film work behind after the Mickey Mouse Club, but kept up with her dancing. She became a protege of instructor Bobby Davis, who owned a Hollywood area studio and put out several records of original music for tap dancers. The records were accompanied by photo booklets in which fifteen year old Nancy, billed as Miss C.A.M. Records of 1957, demonstrated tap moves step-by-step.
Nancy moved to Las Vegas and married James Caldwell, a few months after turning seventeen, but lost her husband shortly afterwards in a train accident, while pregnant with their son. She went to work at Caesar's Palace as a cocktail waitress, because she realized, as she told a later interviewer, that at 5'1" she was too short to be a showgirl.
She attended the 20th Anniversary reunion at Disneyland, and supplied a photo and update for Keith Keller's 1975 Mickey Mouse Club Scrapbook, but didn't take part in the televised 25th Anniversary show. Later, after moving back to Southern California, she opened her own dance studio in northern San Diego County, a business that she still runs today. She occasionally makes appearances with other Mouseketeers at Disney-related conventions, and in 2005 was asked by the NFFC to re-stage the original Disneyland debut of the Mouseketeers, using kids from her dance studio, for the 50th anniversary celebration.
