LOS ANGELES – Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the tap-dancing world with their astonishing athleticism and inspired generations of dancers, from Fred Astaire to Savion Glover, has died. He was 91.
Nicholas died Tuesday at his home from pneumonia and other complications of a stroke, his son Tony Nicholas said.
“My dad put heaven on hold, and now they can begin the show,” the younger Nicholas said Wednesday.
The Nicholas brothers were still boys when they were featured at New York’s Cotton Club in 1932. Though young, they were billed as “The Show Stoppers.” And 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 their “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 fearless exuberance of children stone-hopping across a pond. In the finale, they leap-frog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.
Tap dancer Rusty Frank, who set up an emergency fund to help pay some of Nicholas’ hospital bills after his stroke, said Nicholas had a unique style that changed the face of tap dance.
“He and his brother, they didn’t just use their feet to dance, they used their whole bodies. And it had an electrifying quality,” she said. “They used ballet, they used jazz, they used acrobatics. … They combined it all.”
The two were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, Fayard stealing dance steps as they went along and teaching them to his brother, who was seven years younger.
“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 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 again without using their hands for balance – left film audiences wide-eyed. The 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 said last year. “We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap, and we just hoped the audience liked it.”
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