Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the world of tap dancing with astonishing athleticism and inspired worship in generations of dancers including Fred Astaire and Savion Glover, has died. He was 91.
Nicholas died Tuesday at his home in Burbank of pneumonia and other complications of a stroke he suffered in November, said his son, Tony.
“My dad put heaven on hold and now they can begin the show,” he said.
Fayard Nicholas was 18 and Harold Nicholas was 11 when they became the featured act at New York’s Cotton Club in 1932. The Nicholas Brothers were the only black performers allowed to mingle with the white celebrity patrons.
“I don’t think that audiences ever looked at them as African-American. I think they just looked at them as great talents,” Tony Nicholas said. “And as a result, that’s why they became so loved.”
Despite the racial hurdles facing 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 the number, the brothers tap across music stands in an orchestra with the 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 non-speaking 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, 1948’s “The Pirate.”
“If you were black, you experienced (prejudice),” Harold Nicholas said. “It wasn’t a real horrible thing for us; we went through it.”
As children, the brothers were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, Fayard Nicholas stealing dance steps as they went along 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 said in 1987.
Harold Nicholas, who died in 2000, once said of his older brother’s dancing, “He was like a poet … talking to you with his hands and feet.”
Their trademark no-hands splits – in which they not only went down but sprang back up without using their hands for balance – left film audiences wide-eyed. Legendary 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 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.”
Fayard Nicholas, born in 1914, and Harold Nicholas, born in 1921, learned to dance watching vaudeville shows while their parents played in the orchestra pit.
The brothers were good enough by 1928 to debut in vaudeville. In 1932 they made their film debut in the short “Pie Pie Blackbird,” and were booked at the Cotton Club as “The Show Stoppers!” It became their base. Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn spotted them at the club and cast them in the Eddie Cantor musical “Kid Millions” (1934).
In later years, Harold Nicholas did solo work in Europe, then returned to Broadway in “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Sophisticated Ladies” and later filmed “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974). Fayard Nicholas won a Tony award in 1989 for his choreography of “Black and Blue,” and the brothers were awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.
Both brothers had tumultuous personal lives. Harold Nicholas admitted that his first marriage, to famed actress Dorothy Dandridge, collapsed because of his relentless womanizing. She died in 1965 at 42.
Fayard Nicholas’ last movie appearance was as “Ulysses” in last year’s “Hard Four.”
In addition to his son Tony, and his wife, Katherine Hopkins-Nicholas, he his survived by another son, Paul, of Los Angeles; a sister; four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
