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.
The Nicholas brothers were boys when they were featured at New York’s Cotton Club in 1932. They were billed as “The Show Stoppers!” And despite racial hurdles, they went to Broadway and Hollywood.
Astaire once told the brothers that the acrobatic elegance and synchronicity of their “Jumpin’ Jive” dance sequence in the film “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.
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 1999. “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.
“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, said of his older brother’s dancing, “He was like a poet … talking to you with his hands and feet.”
