After 36 years in show business, Gregory Hines, 40--tap dancer, singer, actor, comic, former child performer--is surfacing as a movie star: last year in Taylor Hackford's White Nights, this year in Running Scared. Claudia Dreifus interviewed Hines on a recent afternoon in New York.

Q 1

PLAYBOY: What's the weirdest thing you've done for a film role?

Gregory Hines: When I was preparing to play a medical examiner in Wolfen, I hung out for three weeks in the New York M.E.'s building--watching about 150 autopsies. Weekends, I'd go out on rounds with this retired M.E. who worked just to keep his certification. It was gross. I started to drink a lot. Once, we found a guy who'd been dead for two weeks, and you could smell his body from the hallway. The policeman guarding the corpse told me, "You'd be better off reading about this stuff than seeing it." Nevertheless, I went upstairs and saw this two-week-old corpse. The cop had been right.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: What's your second-weirdest moviemaking experience?

Gregory Hines: In Running Scared, Billy Crystal and I were put into a taxicab that was lifted three stories in the air and then dropped--no stunt doubles; we did it ourselves. Each time, I thought I was going to throw up. What stopped me from actually puking was thinking, Gee, Billy and I are really close and he's such a great guy, and I've just got to make sure I don't throw up on him--or it'll be the end of a friendship!

I play a Chicago cop in the movie, so I went out with the vice squad one night, the narcotics squad one night and the gang-crime unit. I took part in a raid, put on a bulletproof vest and actually got to say, "Police--open up!" We ransacked this known heroin dealer's house. I really got into it, though as an old hippie, I felt a little strange. Now, when cops say they're going to search somebody's house, they mean it. They open up the flowerpots, they go for the boxes of Cheerios. We didn't find any heroin, but we found about $6000 in cash--I found $1500 stuffed in a green pepper. The cops were pretty impressed with me for that.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: You have turned out to be so many things; what was the one thing you wanted to be when you grew up?

Gregory Hines: A tap dancer. That was my brother, Maurice, Jr.'s, aim, too--he's two years older. Our parents had been around black vaudeville for most of their lives, and they knew all the tap-dance greats--Honi Coles, Henry LeTang, Little Buck. Little Buck had this fantastic routine where he'd climb up on a piano and just dive off, seemingly onto his head--but just at the last minute, somehow, he would put his hands down, roll off, dive and go into a great split. At any rate, tapping, in the late Forties, was a way up and out of the ghetto. A friend of my father's gave free dance lessons to Maurice, but he would come home and show me what he'd learned. I was a quick study. By the time I was four, we'd put together an act, The Hines Kids, which by adolescence became The Hines Brothers. We toured black vaudeville, black night clubs, the Apollo. Later, when I was around 17, we formed Hines, Hines and Dad. And that was beautiful. How many kids ever get to work with their parents?

Q 4

PLAYBOY: One of the great rumors about your father, Maurice, Sr., is that he was almost Jackie Robinson--the first black man to break into major-league baseball. True?

Gregory Hines: Semitrue. In the early Forties, when they were looking for someone to break the color line in baseball, my father was playing semipro sand-lot ball. Word was out all over the ghetto that the ball clubs were looking for someone to be the first. In our family, everyone said, "Well, maybe they'll pick Maurice." They didn't, of course, and that's led to a bittersweet joke. My father always said "Good thing they picked Jackie Robinson and not me, because if I'd been the first, the black man would just be getting his second shot now." My father's got a terrible temper--really bad. He would never have been able to turn the other cheek to all the abuse that Robinson withstood.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: A mutual friend told us, "When Gregory was an adolescent, all he wanted was to be Sammy Davis Jr." When you were 13, did you wear much jewelry?

Gregory Hines: No, but I combed my hair just like Sammy, sang like him, walked like him and wore those tight-fitting short jackets. I did worship him. He could do everything well--sing, dance, play instruments, do impressions; he was working theaters, movies, night clubs. I thought, Here's a black man who's a great artist and who's having a lot of mainstream success. Now, Sammy gets put down a lot, but I really admire the cat. He's a guy who lived his life out in the open and got a lot of criticism for the risks he took.