Gregory Hines

Gregory Oliver Hines, born in New York City on February 14, 1946, was an American dancer, actor, choreographer, and singer widely regarded as one of the foremost tap dancers of his generation. He grew up in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, the son of Alma Iola (Lawless) and Maurice Robert Hines, himself a dancer, musician, and actor. Hines began tap dancing at age two and was performing semi-professionally by age five, studying alongside his older brother Maurice under choreographer Henry LeTang. The brothers also trained with veteran tap dancers Howard Sims and the Nicholas Brothers when their performance schedules overlapped. Known initially as The Hines Kids, the brothers made nightclub appearances in Miami, Florida, with Cab Calloway, before being billed as The Hines Brothers. When their father joined the act as a drummer in 1963, the trio renamed themselves Hines, Hines, and Dad.

Hines made his Broadway debut alongside his brother in The Girl in Pink Tights in 1954. He returned to Broadway in Eubie! in 1979, earning both a Tony Award nomination and the Theatre World Award for that production. Subsequent Broadway appearances included Comin' Uptown, for which he received another Tony nomination in 1980, and Sophisticated Ladies, which brought him a third nomination in 1981. His Broadway career reached its peak with Jelly's Last Jam in 1992, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.

As a tap artist, Hines was known for an improvisational approach that drew comparisons to jazz drumming, in which he generated cascading rhythms and reshaped phrasing to suit unfolding sound. Tap historian Sally Sommer observed that he deliberately disrupted conventional tempos, aligning tap with free-form jazz and postmodern dance. He was an active advocate for the art form throughout his life, successfully petitioning for the creation of National Tap Dance Day in May 1989, a celebration that spread to forty American cities and eight other nations. He served on the board of directors of Manhattan Tap, was a member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and belonged to the American Tap Dance Foundation, formerly known as the American Tap Dance Orchestra. In 1989, he created and hosted a PBS special, Gregory Hines' Tap Dance in America, which featured performers including Savion Glover and Bunny Briggs. Among the dancers he influenced through teaching were Glover, Dianne Walker, Ted Levy, and Jane Goldberg.

Hines made his film debut in 1981 in Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I, stepping into a role originally intended for Richard Pryor, who sustained severe burns before production began. Actress Madeline Kahn, also appearing in the film, suggested Hines to Brooks after Pryor's hospitalization. Hines also appeared in the horror film Wolfen that same year. His film career gained significant momentum in the mid-1980s. In The Cotton Club (1984), he and his brother Maurice played a 1930s tap-dancing duo. He co-starred with Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights (1985) and with Billy Crystal in the buddy cop film Running Scared (1986). He starred opposite Sammy Davis Jr. in Tap (1989), which marked Davis's final screen performance. Additional film credits include A Rage in Harlem (1991), Waiting to Exhale (1995) alongside Whitney Houston and Loretta Devine, The Preacher's Wife (1996) opposite Houston, Denzel Washington, and Courtney B. Vance, and The Tic Code (1998).

On television, Hines starred in The Gregory Hines Show, a CBS sitcom that ran for one season in 1997 and 1998. He held a recurring role as Ben Doucette on Will & Grace from 1999 to 2000. From 1999 to 2004, he voiced the character Big Bill on the Nick Jr. animated children's series Little Bill, a role for which he won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program in 2003. He also co-hosted the Tony Awards ceremony in both 1995 and 2002.

In the music realm, Hines fronted a rock band called Severance in Venice, Los Angeles, in 1975 and 1976, which served as a house band at a club known as the 4H Club and released a self-titled debut album on Largo Records in 1976. In 1986, he recorded a duet with Luther Vandross titled "There's Nothing Better Than Love," which reached number one on the Billboard R&B charts. His self-titled solo album followed on Epic Records in 1988, produced with support from Vandross and featuring the single "That Girl Wants to Dance with Me," which peaked at number six on the R&B charts in June of that year.

Hines was married twice, first to Patricia Panella, with whom he had a daughter, Daria, and then to Pamela Koslow, with whom he had a son, Zachary. Both marriages ended in divorce. In the final years of his life, he was engaged to bodybuilder Negrita Jayde of Toronto. Hines died of liver cancer on August 9, 2003, while being transported to a hospital from his home in Los Angeles. He had been diagnosed a year earlier but shared the information only with close friends. He was survived by his fiancée, his children Daria and Zachary, stepdaughter Jessica, and grandson Lucian. His funeral was held at St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica, California, and he was buried at St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario. On January 28, 2019, the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp in his honor as part of its Black Heritage Series, with a ceremony held at the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts.