American tap dancer and choreographer. Born in Florence, Italy, his family immigrated to the United States when he was six years old. His father Paul was an American concert singer, and his mother Muriel was an American writer, artist and social activist. His parents divorced in 1916 shortly after coming back to the United States. Draper ran away from home at the age of 17 to dig ditches in Woodstock. His aunt, American Actress Ruth Draper, persuaded him to take an engineering course at the Polytechnic Institute, but he quit after one year. He started working odd jobs around New York City. He was an assistant music critic and briefly became an instructor at an Arthur Murray dance school. It was here that Paul Draper began his tap dancing career. He learned to tap with a few lessons from Tommy Nip's Broadway dance school in 1930 and went to London hoping to find work. He enrolled in the School of American Ballet and learned to fuse his skills in tap and ballet. In 1932, Draper introduced his new "Ballet-Tap" dance form and gained much notoriety for his unique style. He danced to a variety of music but often used classical music in his routines. In 1936 he appeared in the film Colleen with Ruby Keeler. In 1937 he was performing at the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, the Rainbow Room, Carnegie Hall and on Broadway. In 1940 he teamed up with Larry Adler, a virtuoso harmonicist. They became a world-famous act and regulars at New York's City Center. They performed together until 1949 after they were blacklisted as Communist sympathizers. Draper was in a film version of William Saroyan's Time of Your Life in 1948. In 1955 he performed in Stravinsky's L'histoire du Soldat at the Phoenix Theater. In the 1960s, he had performances in Jerome Moross's Gentlemen, Be Seated, in the Broadway musical Come Summer and choreographed pieces for George Kleinsinger's Archy and Mehitabel at Goodspeed Opera House. In the late 1960s Draper began teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By the 1970s, Draper was retired from stage life but did occasionally perform and choreograph pieces for the American Dance Festival and Lee Theodore's American Dance Machine. Paul married European-born ballerina Heidi Vosseler on June 23, 1941, in Rio de Janeiro. They lived in Europe until 1954 when they returned to the United States. They had three daughters, Pamela, Susan and Kate. Paul Draper died of emphysema at his home in Woodstock, New York.