Patrick Swayze established himself as one of Hollywood's most versatile, bankable, and
loveable actors, even named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine in 1991.
Tragically, he passed away far too young in 2009 after a brief battle with pancreatic
cancer, making him an eternally beloved, if somewhat mysterious, Hollywood legend.
Here's the untold truth of Patrick Swayze.
True talent
Swayze's most beloved film is Dirty Dancing and his dancing abilities in the film were
no accident.
Patrick Swayze's mother Patsy was a dance instructor at the University of Houston as
well as the founder and director of the Houston Jazz Ballet Company and then opened a studio
in Los Angeles.
Of course, she also taught her son and it was a path Swayze embraced.
"Been dancing all my life, forced on me or not."
Swayze dropped out of San Jacinto College in Houston to tour as Prince Charming in Disney
on Parade, then landed in New York to train at the famous Joffrey Ballet before he became
a principal dancer with the Eliot Feld Ballet Company, ultimately leading to four roles
on Broadway over the years.
One woman man
Among the moments in Swayze's life in and around his mother's dance studio, the most
notable is that he met the one and only love of his life there.
After he got off the road with Disney on Parade, the 20-year-old came back to Houston in 1972,
returned to his mother's studio, and met a 16-year-old dance student named Lisa Niemi.
That was it for Swayze.
He fell in love with Niemi, and in 1975, they got married.
The couple were wed for an incredible 34 years, up until Swayze's death in 2009.
"She literally is my creative partner.
There just feels like there's a real power between us.
It feels like there's a real chemistry.
Like, like we're soulmates if you believe in that kind of thing."
Battling the bottle
In the memoir The Time of My Life, which he wrote with his wife, Swayze opened up about
his long battle to stay sober, and the bad stuff that happened when he couldn't.
After his father's death in the 1970s, Swayze admitted that he dealt with it by drinking
what he called "copious amounts of alcohol" for the better part of a decade.
Although he scaled back his drinking while shooting the movie City of Joy, he turned
to the bottle again.
While filming Father Hood the next year, he was even drinking on set.
"We were trying to shoot a scene where I'm in the back of a car.
But I had so much to drink, I kept passing out while the cameras were rolling."
He checked into a rehab facility in Tucson, Arizona, but still had relapses, including
the one that nearly undid his marriage.
He and Niemi separated for a year in 2003 because of his drinking.
The two reconciled in 2004 and continued one Hollywood's longest-lasting love stories.
Ghost or angel?
In the movie Ghost, Patrick Swayze plays a man who is killed and then hangs around as
a ghost to watch over his girlfriend, played by Demi Moore.
But Swayze almost didn't get the role.
Initially Director Jerry Zucker didn't want Swayze because of the other movies he'd been
in, but his star power landed him an audition — and he crushed it.
When Swayze read the movie's final scene, Zucker revealed:
"We all had tears in our eyes, right there in the office.
I saw a side of Patrick that I never knew existed."
Despite the shaky ground that led to his casting, Swayze went to bat for another crucial cast
member as well.
Whoopi Goldberg provided comic relief as a phony psychic who Swayze's character uses
to keep in contact with the human world.
But Goldberg wasn't the filmmakers' first choice, and she has Swayze to thank for the
role.
"Had he not said to Jerry Zucker, 'I'm not making this movie unless you put Whoopi Goldberg
in there.'
That's how I got the job!"
It turns out, she was a perfect fit.
"People were resisting me.
And he said, 'I'm not doing it unless she does it.'
And I won an Oscar because of Patrick Swayze."
Hollywood hiatus
Despite his star power, Swayze suddenly disappeared from movies for most of the late 1990s.
In May 1997, Swayze was filming the indie movie Letters from a Killer in northern California,
and while shooting a horseback scene, he fell off the animal and hit a tree.
Swayze's wife said in their 2009 joint memoir that he broke both of his legs, devastating
for a lifelong dancer, and suffered other "life-threatening injuries."
It took Swayze a long time to recover.
So long that he was only able to act in one movie between the time of the accident and
the turn of the century, 1998's Black Dog.
His career didn't truly recover until 2001 and 2002, when he took a rare dramatic turn
as a motivational speaker with a dark secret in Donnie Darko, followed by the role of a
monster truck enthusiast in the comedy Waking Up in Reno.
Nobody puts Swayze in the corner
Dirty Dancing gave the world some indelible cinematic moments.
Perhaps the most memorable moment in the movie is when Johnny, all macho bravado, steps right
up to Baby's controlling father and ominously threatens:
"Nobody puts Baby in a corner."
Like any good movie catchphrase, it's equal parts awesome and cheesy.
In his memoir The Time of My Life, Swayze admitted that he hated that line.
He wrote:
"I could hardly bring myself to say: 'Nobody puts Baby in a corner.'
It sounded so corny."
But, after seeing the final cut of Dirty Dancing, he revealed he had to admit it worked.
Swayze even adapted the line for personal, poignant, and heartbreaking use.
When he was fighting for his life against pancreatic cancer, he'd say:
"Nobody puts Patrick's pancreas in a corner."
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