NAME: Gregory Hines

AGE: 57

NATIONALITY: American

CLAIM TO FAME: Greatest tap-dancer of the modern era

THE most versatile dancer of his generation is dead. Gregory Hines, known for his fast moving, tap dancing feet lost the fight against cancer last week. In a career that stretched well over half a century, Hines successfully conducted a career that spanned all the three visual mediums of entertainment, television, theatre and the cinema.

Gregory Oliver Hines was born on February 14, 1946. Poverty was the inspiration and his mother the inspirer who urged both him and his elder brother, Maurice, as a means of moving out of their New York City ghetto. He first performed together with his elder sibling when he was six. In a 2001 interview he remarked, “I don’t remember not dancing. When I realized I was alive and these were my parents, and I could walk and talk, I could dance.” And so he did.

With a tap style that reminded people of the great Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis Jr., Hines became known at a young age as part of a jazz tap duo with his brother. Many of his industry peers agreed that dancing was something that came to him naturally. It came out of his ‘instincts’, a source of massive creativity that ‘involved both his heart and soul’.

Though he was a regular on Broadway, since the late 1950s, Hines’ movie career kicked off no earlier than 1981. That year he landed his a role in the Mel Brooks comedy History of the World Part I, in which he played a Roman slave. But his most memorable performances are those in movies involving tap dancing. The Cotton Club in 1984 gave the world an opportunity to view his brilliance. Hines plays Sandman Williams in a movie that based around the 1920s New York jazz club scene.

His other memorable performances were cast alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov in the thriller White Nights (1985), in which Hines play an American defector to the Soviet Union, and alongside Billy Crystal in the comedic cop thriller Running Scared (1986). He also appeared with Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett in 1995’s Waiting to Exhale. Hines also had a go at television and had his own sitcom, The Gregory Hines Show, in 1997.

Still it was theatre that appreciated his efforts the most and in 1992 he received the Tony Award (US theatre’s Oscar) for his portrayal of Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering jazz composer.

With the passing of Hines, what people are wondering, has the era of tap dancing finally come to an end? As yet, this surely seems to be the case.