Born Gregory Oliver Hines on February 14, 1946, in New York City, he began taking dance lessons at age three and by the time he was six he and his brother Maurice were performing jazz tap at Harlem's Apollo Theater. By 1954, Hines was already on Broadway when he joined the cast of the Broadway musical The Girl in Pink Tights. He then spent the next 20 years perfecting the craft and art of tap dancing as he toured with his brother and father Maurice Sr. in a nightclub circuit act called "Hines, Hines and Dad", before he left in 1973 to form a rock band called Severance in Southern California.
Itching to put his dancing shoes on again, Hines made it back to New York a few years later and in 1978, scored his first Broadway success with Eubie, and earned a Tony nomination. With his vitality, charm and grace, Hines became one of the leading lights on Broadway for the next few years, as exemplified by two more Broadway hits in Comin' Uptown (1980) and Sophisticated Ladies (1981), for which he received two more Tony nominations for his performances.
His charismatic presence made him natural for films, and he notched his first film role as a last minute replacement for Richard Pryor in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I (1981), where he immediately displayed his sharp comic abilities. Other solid roles followed over the next decade: an unorthodox coroner in Michael Wadleigh's urban thriller Wolfen (1981); a nightclub dancer in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984); an American defector to the Soviet Union in Taylor Hackford's overheated melodrama White Nights (1985); a wise-cracking cop in Peter Hyam's Running Scared (1986), and as the fast-talking con artist Goldy in Bill Duke's underrated A Rage in Harlem (1991).
He returned to Broadway in 1992 for his biggest triumph, a portrayal of Jelly Roll Morton, the famed jazz composer, in Jelly's Last Jam and earned a Tony Award in the process. A few more film appearances came in the '90's, most memorably in Forest Whitaker's Waiting to Exhale (1995), but Hines found a new lease on his career when he appeared on the small screen. He played a single father in a fine, if short-lived sitcom The Gregory Hines Show (1997-98); was popular as Ben Doucette, a love interest for Grace in the hugely popular show Will & Grace for two seasons (1999-2001); and received strong critical notice for his moving take as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the television film Bojangles (2001) that he also produced. His last televised appearance was in June 2002, when he co-hosted the Tony Awards with Bernadette Peters. In addition to his father and brother, he is survived by his fiancee Negrita Jayde; a daughter, Daria Hines; a son, Zach; a stepdaughter, Jessica Koslow; and a grandson.
by Michael T. Toole
