Nicholas, Harold Lloyd

▪ 2001

      American dancer (b. March 21/27, 1921, Winston-Salem, N.C.—d. July 3, 2000, New York, N.Y.), along with his older brother, Fayard, constituted the Nicholas Brothers dance team. In vaudeville shows and nightclubs, on Broadway and television, and especially in motion pictures, they combined elements of ballet, jazz, and acrobatics with tap in their routines to produce displays of dazzling virtuosity, which they called “classical tap.” In their most famous number—the dance to “Jumpin' Jive” in the movie Stormy Weather (1943), the brothers descended a staircase by alternately jumping over each other's head in full splits and landing, still in splits, on the step below. Nicholas began performing as a dancer at age five when he, his brother, and his sister, Dorothy—as the Nicholas Kids—appeared in black vaudeville houses in Philadelphia, and the brothers debuted professionally in 1930 on the Horn & Hardart Kiddie Hour radio show. The brothers went on to bookings at the Lafayette Theater and the Cotton Club in New York City's Harlem and made their movie debut in the short film Pie Pie Blackbird (1932). Discovery by Samuel Goldwyn led to roles in such films as Kid Millions (1934), The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935), Down Argentine Way (1940), and Tin Pan Alley (1940). They also appeared in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 on Broadway, in the London revue Blackbirds of 1936, and in the stage musicals Babes in Arms (1937) and St. Louis Woman (1946). Because of segregation restrictions in Southern states, whites did not perform in movie scenes with blacks, and films were arranged so that black performers' numbers could be easily cut before the films were shown in the South. In The Pirate (1948), however, which was the brothers' last film together, they broke the colour barrier by dancing with Gene Kelly in the “Be a Clown” number. Nicholas moved to France in 1950 and embarked on a solo career that took him throughout Europe and North Africa. In the mid-1960s he returned to the U.S., and by the end of the decade, with his brother's performing career winding down, Nicholas was once again appearing solo. He had roles in such Broadway shows as Sophisticated Ladies (1982) and the touring musical The Tap Dance Kid (1985) and in the films Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Tap (1989). The Nicholas Brothers were recipients of Kennedy Center Honors in 1991 and in 1992 were the subject of a documentary film, The Nicholas Brothers: We Sing and We Dance.

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