Patrick Swayze
Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on August 18, 1952 in Houston, Texas where his mother, Patsy ran a dance school. At his Roman Catholic primary school and Waltrip High School in the city, Patrick was teased while making his way to dance lessons. Although his parents advised him to smack the offenders with his ballet pumps, he (wisely perhaps)opted instead to take classes in self-defence. After school, Swayze went to New York to train as a dancer at Harkness Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet School. His first professional engagement was with Disney on Parade in 1978, and soon afterwards he joined the Broadway cast of the musical Grease.
His first film was Skatetown, USA (1979), in which Swayze played Ace. He claimed a number of minor roles in television, including a part in an episode of M*A*S*H*. In 1983 he appeared as Darry in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of SE Hinton's novel The Outsiders, a picture which established the careers of several up-and-coming actors, notably Matt Damon, Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe.
In the following year's Red Dawn, directed by John Milius, Swayze took the lead as Jed, the head of a gang of teenagers who turn themselves into guerrilla fighters after a Russian invasion of America. The film was cited by The Guinness Book of Records as containing the single greatest number of acts of violence in any movie (more than two per minute).
One of Swayze's co-stars was Jennifer Grey (the daughter of Cabaret's Joel Grey), who later played his co-star, Baby in Dirty Dancing.
After Grandview, USA (1984), a dull comedy drama in which he played a driver in a demolition derby, Swayze appeared the following year in the television mini-series North and South, a civil war drama in which he gave one of his best performances.
Youngblood (1986), a movie about ice hockey players in which he appeared with Rob Lowe and Keanu Reeves, did not fare successful for Swayze, however his next film would make him a household name.
Dirty Dancing (1987), the film which brought him to worldwide fame, was a romance in which he played a dance instructor. Though it had been modestly budgeted and designed primarily for the video market, it became a boxoffice classic.
Having been expected to run no longer than a weekend, Dirty Dancing eventually made more than $300 million; it became the first film to sell a million copies on video (more than 10 million have now been sold) and was regularly cited in polls as the most popular film ever among women. It later became a stage musical.
The picture's principal song, (I've Had) The Time of My Life, is the third most played piece of music at funerals in Britain. Swayze himself made the charts with another song from the film, She's Like The Wind which he had co-written. It was later a hit for David Hasselhoff and (in a hip-hop remix) reached number one in Germany in 2006.
Following Dirty Dancing came a host of small films for Swayze. In one such film, Road House (1989), Swayze played a philosophy graduate turned bouncer who manages to transform the fortunes of a seedy roadside bar with a combination of banal cod-mysticism ("Pain don't hurt,") and kicking people in the face. The film ensured itself a cult following among many college students.
Ghost (1990), a romantic fantasy in which Swayze's murdered character Sam attempts to communicate with his lover Molly (Demi Moore), was another huge hit for Swayze. The scene in which the pair embrace while working at a potter's wheel, to the sound of The Righteous Brothers' Unchained Melody, was immediately and widely parodied in comedy sketches, and remains a classic clip today.
The film was nominated for several Oscars. It took the award for best original screenplay, while Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress for her broad comic turn as the fraudulent medium Swayze enlists to communicate with Molly. It eventually took $500 million at the box office.
After Ghost, Swayze played a Zen thug in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991), an action thriller about surfing bank-robbers, which also starred Keanu Reeves and proved successful for both actors at the box office.
This was perhaps the most successful period of his career. He was voted People magazine's "Sexiest Person of the Year" for 1991 (Tom Cruise won this in 1990 and Nick Nolte in 1992).
He played a doctor in India in Roland Joffe's City of Joy (1992), and a drag queen in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar (1995), where he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance.
In 1996 Swayze had a narrow escape when a lorry he was driving for a scene in the television movie Letters from a Killer overturned; later the same week he fell from a horse and hit a tree. Both his legs were broken, and he suffered four detached tendons in his shoulder. Swayze recovered, but took little work until 2000, when he co-starred in Waking Up in Reno with Billy Bob Thornton and Charlize Theron, and in Forever Lulu with Melanie Griffith.
In June that year, while flying his twin-engined Cessna from Van Nuys, California to Las Vegas, New Mexico he had another brush with death when the plane developed a pressurisation problem over northern Arizona, and he was forced to land on a dirt road. His right wing smashed into a lamppost, although Swayze was unhurt.
In 2001 he had a part in the surreal Donny Darko, which acquired a sizeable cult following, and in 2004 took a cameo (as a dance instructor) in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. That year he also played Allan Quatermain in a television film of King Solomon's Mines.
There were occasional excursions back to his beginnings as a song-and-dance man. In 2003 he appeared in the Broadway production of Chicago, and in 2006 he took on the role of Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls in the West End. His most recent films included The Fox and the Hound 2, in which he provided the voice of an Alpine Dachsbracke; a comedy called Christmas in Wonderland; and Powder Blue, in which he played the owner of a strip club in Los Angeles.
In January 2008 Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When the story was reported two months later, it was said that he had been given only weeks to live. Swayze issued a denial, claiming that he was recovering well, and began work on a new television series in which he starred as a veteran FBI agent called The Beast. Thirteen episodes were screened this year, and the series was well-received.
Earlier this year he admitted in an interview that he was "scared" and "angry" about his disease and promised that he would "not chase staying alive".
Patrick Swayze married, in 1975, Lisa Niemi, whom he met when Lisa (then 14) was a student at his mother's dance school in 1970. It was said that Patrick relentlessly chased her until she would date him, and they were happily married until Patrick's death.