Hines, Gregory (14 Feb. 1946-9 Aug. 2003), dancer, singer, choreographer, actor, and musician, was born Gregory Oliver Hines in New York City to Maurice Hines, Sr., a musician, and Alma Lawless Hines. His parents were of African ancestry; Alma Hines also had Portuguese, Irish, and Jewish roots. Hines and his older brother, Maurice, grew up in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood as well as Sugar Hill, a historic neighborhood in Harlem. Maurice Hines, Sr., was a nightclub drummer whose mother had been a showgirl at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. Destined for professional careers at an early age, Gregory and Maurice, Jr., began tap dancing lessons soon after they learned to walk, studying with Buster Brown, Honi Coles, Henry LeTang, and other tap professionals. By the early 1950s they were performing as the Hines Kids onstage at the Apollo Theater in New York and on tour. Between engagements, they were educated at the Willard Mace Elementary School and at Quintano's School for Young Professionals.

In 1954 both brothers were hired for bit parts in the Broadway show The Girl in Pink Tights, choreographed by Agnes de Mille; Gregory appeared as a shoeshine boy. Soon they were performing in nightclubs on weekends and during school vacations, newly billed as the Hines Brothers, and they also became regular guests on the The Jackie Gleason Show on television. In 1963 they added their father to the act as a drummer, renaming themselves Hines, Hines, and Dad; in addition to dancing, the brothers traded jokes, with Gregory as the comic and Maurice as the straight man. The act took the trio to Las Vegas and eventually to Europe, where their venues included the renowned London Palladium and the Olympia in Paris. They also made frequent guest appearances on the The Ed Sullivan Show and other popular American television variety programs.

By the early 1970s the dancing styles of the two Hines brothers had begun to diverge, with Maurice opting for a more formally choreographed approach and Gregory favoring improvisation. Performing in baggy jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, Gregory likened his looser approach to an extended jazz solo, a take on tap that he defined as "urban." At the same time, the popularity of tap dancing as an entertainment medium had begun to fade. The family act broke up in 1973, and the brothers drifted apart. Gregory moved to Venice, California, a popular beachfront refuge for artists, writers, and musicians, and segued into a life of bohemian informality. Hines later recalled this as a significant period in his life: he had separated himself from his family; an early marriage, to Patricia Panella, had ended; and he was now on his own, free to experiment with a hippie lifestyle that included sex and drugs. All was not play, however: financed by a loan from the comedian Bill Cosby, Hines formed a jazz-rock band called Severance. Over the next four years the band appeared at local clubs and made a recording, but it failed to gain wide popularity and was dissolved in 1977.

Looking for a new outlet for his talents, Hines returned to New York City for another try at acting, leaving behind the bohemianism he had pursued in California. (Indeed, Hines became known as a man of fastidious personal appearance offstage, favoring Armani suits and other elegant attire.) In 1978 he was cast in a feature role as a tap dancer in the play The Last Minstrel Show. Here, Hines rediscovered his love for dancing, which he had largely ignored for five years. Also that year, Hines was a featured performer in the Broadway musical Eubie!, a review based on the songs of the pianist and composer Eubie Blake. Maurice Hines was also a member of the cast, reuniting onstage the two brothers, who had been estranged for many years. That estrangement resumed after the show ended and reportedly persisted until the end of Gregory Hines's life. The choreographer of Eubie! was the brothers' former teacher Henry LeTang. Reviews were positive, and Gregory Hines was nominated for a Tony Award.

Hines's Broadway career now shifted into high gear. In his previous stage appearances, his roles had focused on dancing, but now his talents as a singer and actor were also showcased. In 1979, in Comin' Uptown, a black musical version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Hines played the miserly lead, Scrooge. The show itself received mediocre reviews, but Hines was again nominated for a Tony. The following year he joined the actress Nell Carter in Black Broadway, a review of twentieth-century black musical theater productions. In 1981 Hines costarred with the dancer Judith Jamison in Sophisticated Ladies, a review that paid tribute to the pianist and composer Duke Ellington. The show was a huge hit and ran on Broadway for nearly two years. During that time, Hines also made his movie debut, playing small acting roles in Mel Brooks's comedy History of the World: Part I and Michael Wadleigh's mystery Wolfen (both 1981).

After touring with the road company of Sophisticated Ladies, Hines acted, danced, and sang as the black performer Sandman Williams in Francis Ford Coppola's film The Cotton Club (1984), a musical history of the legendary Harlem nightspot where his grandmother had performed in the 1920s. After receiving positive reviews for that performance, he costarred with the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov in another film, the thriller White Nights (1985), playing an American defector in the Soviet Union. Hines had still another dramatic role as a Chicago detective in Running Scared (1986) and later starred in Tap (1989), the story of a dancer who becomes a criminal. A number of prominent black dancers appeared in Tap, including Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as a Hines protégé, Savion Glover.

By the late 1980s Hines had achieved national recognition as a major talent. In addition to performing, he had spent much of the decade spearheading a campaign to gain wider recognition for tap dancing, an art form whose popularity had been steadily waning. This effort took the form not only of promoting emerging talent like Savion Glover, Ted Levy, and Jane Goldberg, but also of lobbying the federal government-- successfully--for the creation of a national Tap Dance Day. The first celebration occurred in 1988; annual tap dancing events have been featured around the country since, drawing large crowds. Similar celebrations, inspired by the American example, are also held in Europe.

Hines also tried his hand as a pop singer: in 1987 he recorded a hit single, "There's Nothing Better Than Love," a duet with the rhythm-and-blues singer Luther Vandross. A year later, he released an LP, Gregory Hines, which featured him singing rhythm-and-blues standards and also included the duet with Vandross. In 1989 Hines starred in a television special, "Gregory Hines: Tap Dance in America," part of the acclaimed PBS seriesGreat Performances on the public television. The show featured appearances by Hines as well as other American tap stars, both past and present.

In 1992 Hines starred on Broadway in Jelly's Last Jam, based on the life of the famed jazz pianist and composer Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton; Hines also helped choreograph the show. Jelly's Last Jam was a hit, and Hines's performance, which won rave reviews, earned him a Tony Award, for best actor in a musical. Hines also received a Tony nomination for his work as a choreographer.

During the 1990s Hines continued to make movies, playing dramatic roles in such films as Eve of Destruction (1991), Renaissance Man (1994), Waiting to Exhale (1995), The Preacher's Wife (1996), Mad Dog Time (1996), and The Tic Code (1999). These and most of Hines's other films--he made more than two dozen--were largely forgettable, but he received praise for his performances. In the late 1990s he returned to television, costarring with Jerry Stiller and other actors in a short-lived series, SUBWAYStories: Tales from the Underground (1997), set in New York City. He also starred briefly in his own television series, The Gregory Hines Show (1997), in which he played a Chicago widower raising a young son; though the show received positive reviews, it failed to attract a large audience and was canceled after a short run. Hines also had a recurring role as an executive on the popular television comedy series Will and Grace, beginning in 1999.

In 2001 Hines played the famous tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Bojangles, a film made for the cable television network Showtime. A year later, he directed and costarred in another Showtime movie, The Red Sneakers, playing a mentor to an aspiring young basketball player. Also in 2002 Hines cohosted the Tony Awards ceremony with the Broadway star Bernadette Peters. Later that year, Hines began negotiations with the NBC television network to star in a new series, set in a New York City dance studio, but illness intervened. He died of liver cancer in Los Angeles.

Though the multitalented Hines was at home in a variety of performance-related fields, he maintained that dance always remained the center of his life, even during his hiatus from that medium in the 1970s. Everything Hines did--"my singing, my acting, my lovemaking, my being a parent"--was influenced by dancing, according to an interview with the New York Times critic Stephen Holden. In that medium he projected both intelligence and daring, and he often said that he considered himself an athlete more than a showman. To that end, the long and lean Hines concentrated on maintaining his physical fitness, lifting weights and exercising to keep his body in shape. However, Hines's performances were not demonstrations of sheer athleticism; rather, they presented a dramatic merger of complex and powerful musical and bodily rhythms in which, in the words of the dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, "Visual elegance . . . yields to aural power."

In addition to performing, Hines also wrote introductions to several books on tap, including Constance Valis Hill's Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000), a biography of the Nicholas Brothers, a tap-dancing duo who flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. He also wrote an introduction to Tap!: The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (1990), a history of the genre by Rusty E. Frank, and to the children's book Savion!: My Life in Tap (2000), by Savion Glover and Bruce Weber.

Hines was married twice. With his first wife, Patricia Panella, whom he married in the mid-1960s (sources disagree on whether the marriage occurred in 1966 or 1968), he had a daughter before the couple divorced in 1973. In 1981 he married Pamela Koslow, with whom he had a son; they divorced in 2000. At the time of his death, Hines was engaged to Negrita Jayde.

The Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance, which includes historical memorabilia on the history of tap dancing related to Hines as well as other performers, is housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; it also includes biographical information. Gina DeAngelis's Gregory Hines (2000) is a children's biography. Hines includes autobiographical anecdotes in his introduction to Rusty E. Frank's book Tap!. Hines's quote on dancing is in Stephen Holden, "Gregory Hines Breaks into Records," New York Times, 6 July 1998. Hines's obituary in the New York Times, 11 Aug. 2003, includes Anna Kisselgoff's quote, taken from a review of a performance by Hines in 1995.