Fayard Nicholas, Groundbreaking Hoofer, Dies at 91
NY Times
Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the world of tap dancing with astonishing athleticism, inspiring generations of dancers from Fred Astaire to Savion Glover, died on Tuesday at his home here. He was 91.
The cause was pneumonia and other complications of a stroke he suffered in November, his son Tony said.
Fayard was 18 and Harold was 11 when they became the featured act at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1932.
Despite the racial hurdles facing them as black performers, they went on to Broadway, then Hollywood. Astaire once told the brothers that the acrobatic elegance and synchronicity of the “Jumpin’ Jive” dance sequence in “Stormy Weather” (1943) made it the greatest movie-musical number he had ever seen. In that number, the brothers tap across music stands in an orchestra with the fearless exuberance of children stone-hopping across a pond. In the finale, they leap-frog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.
Their polished urbanity and classic good looks made the Nicholas Brothers film stars despite the celluloid segregation that relegated them to nonspeaking parts and dance sequences that could be easily cut for racially squeamish audiences in the South. They finally danced with a white star, Gene Kelly, in their last film together, “The Pirate” (1948).
As children, the brothers were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, with Fayard stealing dance steps and teaching them to his brother.
“We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork,” Harold Nicholas recalled in a 1987 interview.
Harold, who died in 2000, once likened his older brother’s dancing to poetry, saying that he was “talking to you with his hands and feet.”
Their trademark no-hands splits — in which they not only went down but sprang back up again without using their hands for balance — left film audiences wide-eyed. The choreographer George Balanchine called it ballet, despite their lack of formal training.
“My brother and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything,” Fayard Nicholas told the Los Angeles television station KCET in 2005. “We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap and we just hoped the audience liked it.”
The dancer and actor Gregory Hines, who died in 2003 at the age of 57, once said that if a film were ever made about the Nicholas Brothers, the dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because nobody could duplicate them.
The Nicholas Brothers learned to dance watching vaudeville shows while their parents played in the orchestra pit.
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