He and Maurice Hines were cast as brothers in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), set in the
Harlem club where their grandmother had been one of the elite black
entertainers performing for a whites-only audience in the twenties and
thirties. Coppola encouraged the brothers to improvise so they based
one scene on their real-life reunion in "Eubie!" and admitted the tears
were real.
Inducted into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame in 2004.