Patrick Swayze

Patrick Swayze: The Dancer Who Refused to Be Ridiculous

*Dirty Dancing* was made so cheaply its backers planned a single week in theatres before dumping it onto video. Instead it became the first film to sell a million videocassettes and had grossed more than $214 million by 2009. The reason was a ballet-trained Texan with a surgically rebuilt knee who could carry a sentimental resort romance without a flicker of embarrassment — and who could lift a partner over his head and make it read as feeling rather than acrobatics.

Houston, Patsy Swayze, and a Ruined Knee

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on 18 August 1952 in Houston, Texas, the second child of Jesse Wayne Swayze, an engineering draftsman, and Patsy Swayze, a dancer, choreographer and dance instructor whose studio shaped her son's entire physical vocabulary. He grew up in the Oak Forest neighbourhood, attending St Rose of Lima Catholic School, Frank Black Middle School and Waltrip High School, where he played football until a knee injury ended that ambition. He went on to San Jacinto College Central. In 1970 he drew a low Vietnam draft number, 141; the same knee that had cost him football probably kept him out of the war.

New York, Harkness, Joffrey

At twenty he moved to New York for formal training at the Harkness and Joffrey Ballet schools. The choreographer Eliot Feld planned a ballet built around Swayze and Mikhail Baryshnikov — an indication of how seriously the dance world took him — but the knee required reconstruction and the project died. He made his professional dance debut with the Disney Theatrical Group in *Disney on Parade*, then played Danny Zuko in a replacement cast of Broadway's *Grease*. The injury that closed the ballet career is the hinge of his life: it pushed a genuine dancer into film at precisely the moment American cinema had almost none.

From The Outsiders to Johnny Castle

His film debut came in *Skatetown, U.S.A.* (1979). He appeared in an episode of *M*A*S*H* and in Toto's "Rosanna" video in 1981, then broke through with Francis Ford Coppola's *The Outsiders* (1983) alongside Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez, followed by *Uncommon Valor* (1983), *Red Dawn* (1984), the Civil War miniseries *North and South* (1985–86) and *Youngblood* (1986).

Then *Dirty Dancing* (1987), with Swayze as the resort dance instructor Johnny Castle opposite Jennifer Grey. It brought a Golden Globe nomination and something rarer: a leading man whose authority came from how he moved. He also co-wrote and sang "She's Like the Wind" for the soundtrack with Stacy Widelitz — originally written for the 1984 film *Grandview, U.S.A.* — and it reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100. He said in 2008 that his wife, Lisa Niemi, had inspired it.

Ghost, Point Break, and the Peak

*Road House* (1989) built the cult. *Ghost* (1990), with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, was the highest-grossing film of its year and the most-rented videocassette of 1991, and brought a second Golden Globe nomination; Swayze had personally pushed for Goldberg's casting, and she thanked him in her Academy Award acceptance speech. *Point Break* (1991) put him opposite Keanu Reeves as the philosopher-surfer bank robber Bodhi, with Swayze performing many of his own skydiving stunts. In 1991 People named him Sexiest Man Alive. Then, in a swerve nobody predicted, he played a drag queen in *To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar* (1995) with Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo, and earned his third Golden Globe nomination.

The Long Middle, and The Beast

He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997. That May, filming HBO's *Letters from a Killer*, he fell from a horse into a tree, breaking both legs and detaching four shoulder tendons; production stopped for two months and his recovery ran to 2000. He had already fought a decade-long battle with alcoholism after his father's death in 1982, entering rehabilitation in the 1990s and withdrawing for a time to breed Arabian horses in California and New Mexico. Later work included *Donnie Darko* (2001), in which he played a motivational speaker revealed as a predator; *One Last Dance* (2003), which he co-produced and scored opposite Niemi; *King Solomon's Mines* (2004); and a West End run as Nathan Detroit in *Guys and Dolls* in 2006. His last role was FBI agent Charles Barker in A&E's *The Beast*, which premiered on 15 January 2009. The critic Alan Sepinwall wrote that "this is the best performance of his career... the cancer may be fueling the performance."

Why Patrick Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on physical craft, not intellect, and pretending otherwise would insult the actual achievement. Swayze's gift was the trained dancer's control of weight, line and timing — years at Harkness and Joffrey, and a choreographer good enough to pair him with Baryshnikov — applied to a medium where almost nobody else had that vocabulary. It is why the *Dirty Dancing* lifts read as emotional events rather than stunts, why the pottery wheel scene in *Ghost* works with barely any dialogue, and why he could carry action, romance and *To Wong Foo* without the register collapsing. Add an unusual absence of vanity: the same actor who was People's Sexiest Man Alive in 1991 played, without protection, a drag queen and a paedophile.

The counter-case is that nobody in the industry mistook him for a great actor. He never received an Academy Award nomination, his three Golden Globe nominations all went unconverted, and much of his filmography is genre material remembered fondly rather than admired. The interest in his late work — Sepinwall's line about *The Beast* — is partly the interest of watching a dying man refuse to stop. So call it what it was: a rare bodily intelligence, honestly earned, deployed in films that mostly did not deserve it.

Legacy

Swayze was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in mid-January 2008, after abdominal pain during the filming of *The Beast*, and treated at Stanford with the experimental drug vatalanib. A forty-year smoker who had once smoked sixty cigarettes a day, he acknowledged the likely cause and kept working. On the *Stand Up to Cancer* broadcast in September 2008 he said: "I dream that the word 'cure' will no longer be followed by the words 'it's impossible'." He died at home on 14 September 2009, aged 57, roughly twenty months after diagnosis, survived by Lisa Niemi, whom he had married on 12 June 1975 and who had first met him at his mother's dance studio.