Mattox was a dancer, choreographer and teacher who helped shape contemporary jazz dance in the United States and Europe.

Mr. Mattox, who had made his home in France for many years, had a prominent career dancing in films and on Broadway in the 1940s and afterward. Though he was not as well known as some of the celebrated Hollywood dancers of his era, he was by all accounts every bit their peer.

As a dancer, Mr. Mattox was celebrated for his “ballpoint ease, pinpoint precision, and catlike agility,” as Dance magazine wrote in 2007. He was perhaps best known to moviegoers as the young, bearded Caleb Pontipee, one of the marriageable frontiersmen at the heart of the 1954 film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

On Broadway, Mr. Mattox danced in Once Upon a Mattress (1959), in which he created the role of the Jester; and in the 1957 revival of Brigadoon, in which he played Harry Beaton.

Combining his own extensive training in ballet with tap dance, modern dance and folkloric dance traditions from around the world, he created a new, fluidly integrated art form he liked to call “freestyle dance.”

Source: The New York Times