Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the tap dancing world with their astonishing athleticism, has died at age 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.
Fred 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 leapfrog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.
“We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork,” Harold Nicholas recalled in a 1987 interview.
Their dancing betrayed not only creative genius but also the athletic marvel of what no one else would dare attempt.
“My brother and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything,” Fayard Nicholas said in an interview last year. “We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap and we just hoped the audience liked it.”
Fayard, born in 1914, and Harold, born in 1921, learned to dance watching vaudeville shows while their parents played in the pit orchestra.
“One day at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia, I looked onstage and I thought, ‘They’re having fun up there; I’d like to do something like that’,” Fayard recalled in a 1999 interview.
“We worked up an act called ‘The Nicholas Kids,’ and did it in the living room. Our father said: ‘When you’re dancing, don’t look at your feet, look at the audience. You’re not entertaining yourself, you’re entertaining the audience.’ ”
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, which became their base. They were allowed to mingle with the white celebrity patrons before going home to bed at 5 or 6 a.m. They would sleep until 3 p.m., when their daily tutoring began, then return to the club by chauffeur-driven limousine for the first show at midnight. Fayard was 18, Harold 11.
Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn spotted them at the club and cast them in the Eddie Cantor musical “Kid Millions” (1934).
Their polished urbanity and classic good looks made them 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, “The Pirate” in 1948.
“If you were black, you experienced (prejudice),” Harold Nicholas once said. “It wasn’t a real horrible thing for us; we went through it.”
In later years, Harold did solo work in Europe, then returned to Broadway in The Tap Dance Kid and Sophisticated Ladies and to film in Uptown Saturday Night (1974). Fayard won a Tony award in 1989 for his choreography of Black and Blue, and the brothers were awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.
