Hines, Gregory Oliver

(b. 14 February 1946 in New York City; d. 9 August 2003 in Los Angeles, California), tap dancer, actor, teacher, and choreographer who worked on Broadway and in television and film and helped to revive the popularity of tap dancing as an American art form.

The second of the two sons of Maurice Hines, Sr., and Alma Iola (Lawless) Hines, Hines grew up in a family of entertainers. After working as a nightclub bouncer, Hines’s father found his niche as a drummer. Hines’s paternal grandmother had been a showgirl at the Cotton Club in Harlem during the 1920s. Hines occasionally claimed that he grew up in Harlem, but his mother, a homemaker, said that he had spent much of his childhood in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Hines was educated at the Willard Mace Elementary School for professional children and at Quintano’s School for Young Professionals.

Hines’s brother, Maurice, had begun studying tap dancing at an early age, and Hines followed suit starting at age three. Both Hines brothers were influenced by a number of older tap dancers, including Buster Brown and Honi Coles. They also studied with the well-known tap dancer and choreographer Henry LeTang. Before long the boys were touring as the Hines Kids. They performed at the Apollo Theater in New York City. In 1954 both brothers had bit parts, Hines playing a shoe-shine boy, in the Broadway production of The Girl in Pink Tights, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. The following year the brothers began playing in nightclubs on weekends and during the summer. They also appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show (1952–1959). In 1955 the Hineses changed the name of their act to the Hines Brothers.

In 1963 Hines’s father began playing drums for his sons, and the act then became known as Hines, Hines, and Dad. Hines’s brother played the straight man, and Hines was the comic. The group toured for several years, performing in Las Vegas, in Europe, and on television programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971) and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992).

Although both Hineses took inspiration from some of the same older tap dancers, each brother developed his own style. “My style of tap is more improvisational,” Hines told the biographer Gina DeAngelis. “My brother had much more of a choreographic aspect, working things out beforehand.” According to DeAngelis, starting in the 1970s Hines was known for “a more urban style, a jazz type of improvisation.” Often dancing in a sleeveless white T-shirt and baggy pants, Hines was compared to a jazz band musician taking off on a long solo. The American dance critic Deborah Jowitt wrote that Hines “wanted audiences to think of tap as a complex art that involved both brains and daring, and he considered himself an athlete more than a showman.”

In 1968 (some sources say 1966) Hines married Patricia Panella. The couple had one child. By the late 1960s tap dancing had begun going out of style, and Hines reassessed his career goals. By 1972 he realized that the family act no longer really fulfilled him. In 1973 the act dissolved, and so did Hines’s marriage. He moved to Venice, California. With the help of a loan from the comedian Bill Cosby, Hines formed Severance, a jazz-rock band. The band played club dates and eventually released an album, but the recording was not well received. In California, Hines met Pamela Koslow, who would eventually become his second wife. In 1977 Hines’s band broke up, and Hines returned to New York City.

Hines was cast in the play The Last Minstrel Show in 1978, the first time in years that he had tap danced for a living. He reconnected with his brother in the musical Eubie!, a revue of songs by the pianist and composer Eubie Blake. LeTang, who had been one of Hines’s mentors, choreographed Eubie!, which opened on Broadway in May 1978. In recognition of his contributions to the show, Hines was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

In 1979 Hines played the miserly Scrooge in Comin’ Uptown, a black version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The show did not fare well, yet Hines was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. The following year, Hines and Nell Carter performed in Black Broadway, a retrospective of popular African-American productions from 1900 to 1950.

The Duke Ellington revue Sophisticated Ladies, which opened on Broadway in March 1981, was one of Hines’s favorite stage credits. The piece showcased his versatility as an actor, singer, and dancer. Sophisticated Ladies ran on Broadway for nearly two years. Hines costarred with Judith Jamison, who became artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. On 12 April 1981 Hines married Pamela Koslow, who had a daughter, and the couple had one son. The marriage ended in divorce in 2000.

The national tour of Sophisticated Ladies took Hines back to the West Coast, and while there he began his film career. In History of the World, Part I (1981), he played a Roman slave, and in Wolfen (1981), he portrayed a medical examiner who probes a series of unexplained deaths. The mid-1980s was an especially fruitful time for Hines’s film career. After hearing that a movie about the Cotton Club was in the works, Hines began lobbying for a role and was cast as the up-and-coming dancer Sandman Williams. When The Cotton Club came out in 1984, critics praised Hines’s contributions. A year later he was again widely recognized, this time for his performance as an expatriate Communist opposite the ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights, a thriller set in the Soviet Union. Other credits from that period included Running Scared (1986), in which Hines played an undercover Chicago police officer who wants to retire, and Tap (1989), about a tap dancer who turns to crime. Tap featured talent ranging from Sammy Davis, Jr., to Savion Glover, one of Hines’s protégés.

In the late 1980s Hines embarked on several projects that helped further the recognition of tap dancing as an art. In 1988 he lobbied successfully for the creation of a national Tap Dance Day, which has been celebrated in the United States and other countries. The following year Hines launched Gregory Hines: Tap Dance in America (1989), a Public Broadcasting Service television special spotlighting U.S. tap-dancing legends.

Returning to the stage in 1992, Hines starred in Jelly’s Last Jam. He won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of the jazz pianist and composer Ferdinand (“Jelly Roll”) Morton. Hines continued to build his film career during the 1990s. He performed in Renaissance Man (1994), Waiting to Exhale (1995), The Preacher’s Wife (1996), and Mad Dog Time (1996).

In 1997 Hines, Jerry Stiller, and several other actors collaborated on SUBWAYS tories: Tales from the Underground for television. Also in 1997 Hines starred in the short-lived television program The Gregory Hines Show. He played a Chicago widower rediscovering romance just as his young son is falling in love. In 1999 Hines had a recurring role on the hit comedy Will and Grace.

In another of his portrayals of bygone African-American entertainers, Hines played the tap-dance legend Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson in 2001 for the Showtime film Bojangles. A year later Hines directed the Showtime movie The Red Sneakers and played a drug dealer who gives an aspiring basketball star a pair of shoes that helps the young man achieve his dream.

Hines died of liver cancer on 9 August 2003 in Los Angeles. He was fifty-seven years old. At the time of his death Hines was engaged to Negrita Jayde. He is buried in Saint Volodymyr’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

A biography is Gina De Angelis, Gregory Hines (2000). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 11 Aug. 2003) and the Village Voice (13–19 Aug. 2003). The Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts includes films, videos, articles, and photographs pertaining not only to Hines but also to the art form of tap dancing.

Whitney Smith