Gregory Hines, who died in Los Angeles on Saturday aged 57, was the finest tap dancer of his generation; he was perhaps best known to British audiences from films such as The Cotton Club (1984) and White Nights (1985), but it was on the stage, in particular, that he had done more than any other performer to preserve one of the great American art forms.

Tap is largely learned by watching, imitating and developing the styles of other dancers, and in its heyday from about 1910 until 1950 its best exponents became almost an hereditary priesthood, their techniques passed down to selected younger tappers.

Hines, the son of a dancer, made his professional debut at the age of five, and spent much of his childhood backstage in theatres where he picked up lessons from, among others, Sandman Sims, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Harold Nicholas (whom Fred Astaire thought the most elegant dancer he had ever seen) and later Sammy Davis Jr, who became Hines's mentor.

Hines himself grew up to be an exceptionally graceful tapper, yet one always alive to the aural as well as visual possibilities of the form, using his feet to build jazzy, expressive rhythms of varying density and volume, all conjured from something as prosaic as the shifting of weight from one foot to the other.

This skill Hines employed in a series of Broadway shows that brought him four Tony nominations. Meanwhile, his campaign to increase recognition of tap was rewarded in 1998 by the creation of National Tap Day.

Gregory Oliver Hines was born in New York City on St Valentine's Day 1946 and grew up in the Sugar Hill district of Harlem. From the age of three he and his elder brother Maurice, who also became a noted tapper, studied dance with the celebrated teacher Henry LeTang. Three years later, the pair were appearing together at the Apollo Theater, Harlem, and at eight Hines had his first part in a Broadway musical, as a shoeshine boy in The Girl in Pink Tights (1954).

Their father, who was also a musician, then joined their act as a drummer, and they toured nationally and appeared on television programmes such as T he Ed Sullivan Show . By the early 1970s, however, Hines was feeling too constricted by these familial bonds. He fell out with his father and brother and decamped to Venice Beach, California, where he became a hippie and formed a jazz-rock band.

Having asserted his independence, in 1979 he returned to the stage with his brother in Eubie! , a musical about the composer Eubie Blake which was choreographed by LeTang. Critics agreed that his dancing had become both more relaxed and assured, and he was nominated for a Tony, as he was in each of the next two years for Comin' Uptown , a black version of A Christmas Carol , and Sophisticated Ladies , a tribute to Duke Ellington.

Hines was a charming and usually phlegmatic man, but his failure to win any of the three awards rankled with him, a bitterness that was not assuaged until 1992, when he was voted Best Actor for his portrayal of Jelly Roll Morton, the jazz pioneer who denied his black ancestry, in Jelly's Last Jam .

From the start of the 1980s, Hines also began to appear in films, where he eventually established himself as a straight actor as well as a dancer. His first role was a Roman slave in Mel Brooks's History of the World - Part I (1981), a part Hines took over from the terminally ill Richard Pryor. He then lost the lead in 48 Hours (1982) to another young black comic, Eddie Murphy, before featuring in Francis Ford Coppola's expensive fiasco The Cotton Club (1984).

The film, which starred Richard Gere, was generally held to lack a plot, but Hines - playing a character modelled on Harold Nicholas - was singled out for his part in the musical scenes at the celebrated Harlem nightspot, where his grandmother had once been a dancer.

This role was followed by another underpowered film, White Nights - essentially an excuse to team Hines with the ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov in a story of two defectors - that again lacked a narrative to go with the enjoyable dance numbers.

Hines completed a trio of hoofing films with Tap (1989), an improbable yarn in which he was torn between tap-dancing and cat-burgling, although it did provide cameos for many of the great names of tap, including Davis, Sims and Hines's protege Savion Glover. A sequence set on the pavement outside a bar, and drawing on the sound of traffic for its inspiration, gave a good example of the use of sound in "street" tap.

His non-dancing screen roles included leading parts in Running Scared (1986), with Billy Crystal, A Rage in Harlem (1991), where he did his best with a scanty role as a criminal called Goldy in 1950s New York, and Waiting to Exhale (1995). He also appeared as a villainous property developer determined to tear down the church in The Preacher's Wife , a glutinous remake of The Bishop's Wife , which served as a vehicle for the singer Whitney Houston.

On the small screen, his own sitcom, The Gregory Hines Show , ran for a year on NBC in 1997, and recently he had had a recurring role in the television comedy Will & Grace , where he was the former's boss and had a brief fling with the latter.

In 2000, he played Holly Hunter's married lover in Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her , before going on to play a drug dealer in Once in the Life . He received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Robinson in the biopic Bojangles on television in 2001.

He made one feature film as a director, Bleeding Hearts , in 1994, and two years ago directed an updated version of The Red Shoes for television.

He was twice married and divorced, and is survived by a son and a daughter.