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Compiled from Times wiresGregory Hines believed in tap and handed that love down to a new generation. He died Saturday at 57.
Gregory Hines, the innovative and influential tap dance star who became invaluable in the renewal of his art and also enjoyed wide success as a film and television actor, has died. He was 57.
Master of a distinctively earthy, roughhewn tap style, the Tony and Daytime Emmy award-winning performer died Saturday (Aug. 9, 2003) in Los Angeles of cancer.
Mr. Hines began dancing professionally as a child and became a successful crossover actor in theater, film and television. He won a Tony Award as best actor in a musical in 1992 for his portrayal of Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering jazz composer, his fourth Tony nomination as a performer.
"His dancing came from something very real," said Bernadette Peters, who co-hosted the 2002 Tony Awards with Mr. Hines. "It came out of his instincts, his impulses and his amazing creativity. His whole heart and soul went into everything he did."
He appeared in major films, including Francis Ford Coppola's Cotton Club, and White Nights, with Mikhail Baryshnikov, in which Mr. Hines played an American defector to the Soviet Union. He had his own sitcom, The Gregory Hines Show, on CBS in 1997 and played recurring characters on Will & Grace on NBC and Lost at Home on ABC.
Mr. Hines never forgot his dance origins, however, and he was a tireless advocate for tap in America. In 1988 he lobbied for the creation of a National Tap Dance Day, now celebrated in 40 cities in the United States and in eight other nations.
Mr. Hines encouraged hosts of younger tap-dancers, including Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, Ted Levy and Jane Goldberg, in their careers and frequently proclaimed the talents of the old-time stars.
Though he had had formal training in dance, Mr. Hines spoke often of older stylists such as Buster Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. who influenced him in tap, an art that is largely handed down rather than taught.
"It felt like he was passing the torch down to me every night," Mr. Hines' Tap co-star Glover wrote in his book Savion.
Born Feb. 14, 1946, in New York, Mr. Hines began training in dance at 3 with Henry LeTang and made his professional debut two years later with his older brother, Maurice Jr., in an act called the Hines Kids (later the Hines Brothers and, when his father, Maurice Sr., joined the act in 1963, Hines, Hines and Dad).
In the late 1960s, the brothers had a falling out over the direction of the act. They also saw tap-dancing had largely lost its popular appeal.
"Tap had died, and we were doing lounge routines," Mr. Hines told the New York Daily News. "So I didn't dance for seven years. Didn't even own a pair of dance shoes."
Mr. Hines was drawn to the California counterculture and searched for some sort of spiritual awakening while working as a busboy, karate teacher and songwriter.
It was not until he reached his late 30s, Mr. Hines said in Gregory Hines: Tap Dance in America, that he began to "relax and reach true expression." In 1978, he had his first Broadway success, starring in the musical Eubie!, for which he received his first Tony nomination.
He followed up that success with Tony-nominated performances in Comin' Uptown (1980) and Sophisticated Ladies (1981), and played a Roman slave in his film debut in Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I.
Mr. Hines established himself as a first-rate actor on Broadway with his portrayal of Morton, an egocentric genius, in Jelly's Last Jam. (He also shared a Tony nomination for choreography for that show with Hope Clarke and Levy.) But Vincent Canby, then senior film critic for the New York Times, singled Mr. Hines out as a noteworthy performer in 1984, writing of his "rare screen presence" in The Cotton Club.
"He doesn't sneak up on you," Canby wrote. "He's so laid back, so self-assured and so graceful, whether acting as an ambitious hoofer or tap-dancing, alone or in tandem with his brother, Maurice, that he forces YOU to sneak up on HIM. The vitality and comic intelligence that have made him a New York stage favorite in Eubie and Sophisticated Ladies translate easily to the screen."
Mr. Hines, who was black, often said he made a point of looking for roles written for white actors, preferring their greater scope and dynamics. His portrayal of Ben Stevenson, the single father of a young son, in The Gregory Hines Show, drew on Mr. Hines' natural warmth and charm.
"I am a sucker for the male bonding that takes place between a father and a son," he said in a 1997 interview with the St. Petersburg Times. "And it's such a great script. They didn't try to write it for a black man. It's about a father and a son a Hispanic father, a Jewish father, an Asian father can feel good about it, which I love."
As his career continued in Hollywood, he told the Washington Post, "I like to think of myself as an artist entertainer. But deep down inside, I think of myself as a tap-dancer."
"I mean, like whenever I go abroad, and they say, "occupation,' I put down, "tap-dancer.' I'm so proud of it, you know?"
Mr. Hines' marriages to Patricia Panella and Pamela Koslow ended in divorce. In addition to his father and brother, he is survived by his fiancee, Negrita Jayde; a daughter, Daria Hines; a son, Zach; a stepdaughter, Jessica Koslow; and a grandson.
- Information from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Associated Press was used in this report.