Raymond Beauchemin
November 2009
Movie Entertainment
There was never any doubt the guy could move.
He learned to dance at the feet of his mother, Patsy Swayze, a choreographer and dance school owner. He completed formal training at schools associated with the Harkness and Joffrey ballets in New York. His professional debut was in Disney on Parade; later, he was a Broadway stand-in for Danny Zuko in Grease.
So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that one of the two roles for which Patrick Swayze will be remembered was Johnny Castle, the Catskill resort dance instructor in Dirty Dancing. The 1987 film was shot on virtually no budget at all, aimed for a quick theatrical release before going to video. But Swayze and his co-star Jennifer Grey, who had dancing bona fides of her own, as daughter of Joel Grey, burned through every scene they were in, leading to a surprise boffo box office. When it finally did get to video, Dirty Dancing became the first to sell one million copies. Almost 20 years later, the movie spawned a “prequel, ” Havana Nights, in which Swayze made a cameo; a Broadway and West End musical, and a computer game. She’s Like the Wind, which Swayze wrote, became a Billboard No. 1 hit; he also contributed a song to Roadhouse.
Overnight, Swayze became a leading man. His next major role set him opposite Demi Moore in Ghost (1990). The movie, a sentimental thriller if there is such a thing, was another surprise hit, and earned Swayze his second (after Dirty Dancing) Golden Globe best actor nomination. The movie resurrected the Righteous Brothers song Unchained Melody and made Swayze a cross-cultural hit: among rappers “I’m Swayze” became another way of saying “I’m Ghost,” or “I’m leaving.”
Swayze never left the screen, though. The following year he played a bank-robbing surfer opposite the perpetually melancholic Keanu Reeves in Point Break. Swayze’s physical condition, despite a lifelong smoking habit, no doubt helped him as he learned to surf and skydive.
Swayze’s career took a series of turns for the worse afterward: he got injured, he drank, he got poor roles, but getting off the booze, raising Arabian horses, and relying on his wife of 34 years, Lisa Niemi (they met at his mother’s dance studio; he was 18, she 14), refocused him. Long after the dancing of his prime, he went to London’s West End as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls.
Patrick Swayze, actor, died Sept. 14 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57.