"My brother (Harold) and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything," Fayard Nicholas said in 2005.
		Victoria Arocho, AP

Nicholas died Tuesday at his home from pneumonia and other complications of a stroke he suffered in November 2005, said his son, Tony.

"My dad put heaven on hold and now they can begin the show," he said.

Fayard was 18 and Harold was just 11 when they became the featured act at New York's Cotton Club in 1932.

The Nicholas Brothers were the only black performers allowed to mingle with the white celebrity patrons.

"I don't think that audiences ever looked at them as African-American. I think they just looked at them as great talents," Tony Nicholas said. "And as a result, that's why they became so loved."

Despite the racial hurdles facing black performers, they went on to Broadway, then Hollywood. Astaire once told the brothers that the acrobatic elegance and synchronicity of the Jumpin' Jive dance sequence in 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 leap-frog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.

Their polished urbanity and classic good looks made the Nicholas brothers film stars despite the celluloid segregation that relegated them to non-speaking parts and dance sequences that could be easily cut for racially squeamish audiences in the South. They finally danced with a white star, Gene Kelly, in their last film together, 1948's The Pirate.

"If you were black, you experienced (prejudice)," Harold Nicholas said. "It wasn't a real horrible thing for us; we went through it."

As children, the brothers were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, Fayard stealing dance steps as they went along and teaching them to his brother, who was seven years younger.

"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, once said of his older brother's dancing, "He was like a poet ... talking to you with his hands and feet."

Their trademark no-hands splits — in which they not only went down but sprang back up again without using their hands for balance — left film audiences wide-eyed. The legendary choreographer George Balanchine called it ballet, despite their lack of formal training.

"My brother and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything," Fayard Nicholas told television station KCET in 2005. "We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap and we just hoped the audience liked it."

Dancer and actor Gregory Hines, who died in 2003 at age 57, once said that if a film were ever made about their lives, the dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because nobody could duplicate them.

Fayard, born in 1914, and Harold, born in 1921, learned to dance watching vaudeville shows while their parents played in the orchestra pit.

"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 a 1999 interview.

"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. In 1932 they made their film debut in the short Pie Pie Blackbird, and were booked at the Cotton Club as The Show Stoppers! It became their base. They went to bed at 5 or 6 a.m. They would sleep until 3 p.m., when their daily tutoring began, then return to the club by chauffeur-driven limousine for the first show at midnight. Fayard was 18, Harold 11.

Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn spotted them at the club and cast them in the Eddie Cantor musical Kid Millions (1934).

In later years, Harold did solo work in Europe, then returned to Broadway in The Tap Dance Kid and Sophisticated Ladies and to film in Uptown Saturday Night (1974). Fayard won a Tony award in 1989 for his choreography of Black and Blue, and the brothers were awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.

The two remained close throughout their lives, despite their different personalities. Fayard was known as the more outgoing of the two, the one whose optimism kept the act afloat. Harold was more withdrawn and introspective.

Both brothers had tumultuous personal lives. Harold admitted that his first marriage, to famed actress Dorothy Dandridge, collapsed because of his relentless womanizing. Dandridge, the first black woman nominated for a best-actress Oscar, died of a drug overdose in 1965 at 42.

In an interview for A & E's Biography in 1999, Fayard said wistfully, "I tried to be a good husband and father. ... I don't know what happened."

But he remained on good terms with his first wife, Geraldine, and by all accounts, had a long and happy marriage to his second wife, the late Barbara January. He married dancer Katherine Hopkins in 2000.

Up until his stroke, he continued to tap dance and speak at dance festivals around the world. His two granddaughters, calling themselves the Nicholas Sisters, would perform his old steps.

In addition to his son Tony, and his wife, Katherine Hopkins-Nicholas, he his survived by another son, Paul, of Los Angeles; sister Dorothy Nicholas Morrow of Los Angeles; four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.