LOS ANGELES Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into viewers' hearts with "Dirty Dancing" and then broke them with "Ghost," died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.
"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. No other details were given.
Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer.
He had kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting "The Beast," an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot. It drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.
Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making "The Beast" because they would have taken the edge off his performance. He acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.
When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was "considerably more optimistic" than that.
"I'd say five years is pretty wishful thinking," Swayze told ABC's Barbara Walters in early 2009. "Two years seems likely if you're going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I'd better get a fire under it."
A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad-boy Johnny Castle in "Dirty Dancing." As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role.
A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort's sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.
It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in "(I've Had) the Time of My Life," stage productions and a sequel, 2004's "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," in which he made a cameo.
Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad "She's Like the Wind," inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."
And it allowed him to poke fun at himself on a "Saturday Night Live" episode, in which he played a wannabe Chippendales dancer alongside the corpulent and frighteningly shirtless Chris Farley.
A major crowdpleaser, the film drew only mixed reviews from critics, though Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, "Given the limitations of his role, that of a poor but handsome sex-object abused by the rich women at Kellerman's Mountain House, Mr. Swayze is also good. ... He's at his best as is the movie when he's dancing."
Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action flick "Road House," in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990's "Ghost" that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Demi Moore) with great frustration and longing through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.
Swayze said at the time that he fought for the role of Sam Wheat (director Jerry Zucker wanted Kevin Kline) but once he went in for an audition and read six scenes, he got it.
Why did he want the part so badly? "It made me cry four or five times," he said of Bruce Joel Rubin's Oscar-winning script in an AP interview.
"Ghost" provided yet another indelible musical moment: Swayze and Moore sensually molding pottery together to the strains of the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody." It also earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Goldberg, who said she wouldn't have won if it weren't for Swayze.
"When I won my Academy Award, the only person I really thanked was Patrick," Goldberg said in March 2008 on the ABC daytime talk show "The View."
Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for "Dirty Dancing," "Ghost" and 1995's "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar," which further allowed him to toy with his masculine image. The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo.
His heartthrob status almost kept him from being considered for the role of Vida Boheme.
"I couldn't get seen on it because everyone viewed me as terminally heterosexually masculine-macho," he told the AP then. But he transformed himself so completely that when his screen test was sent to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin pictures produced "To Wong Foo," Spielberg didn't recognize him.
Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup of up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders," alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane. Swayze played Darrel "Dary" Curtis, the oldest of three wayward brothers and essentially the father figure in a poor family in small-town Oklahoma.
Other '80s films included "Red Dawn," "Grandview U.S.A." (for which he also provided choreography) and "Youngblood," once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates.
In the '90s, he made such eclectic films as "Point Break" (1991), in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western "Tall Tale" (1995), in which he starred as Pecos Bill. He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he also had stay in rehab for alcohol abuse. In 2001, he appeared in the cult favorite "Donnie Darko," and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with "Chicago"; 2006 found him in the musical "Guys and Dolls" in London.
Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include "Urban Cowboy."
He played football but also was drawn to dance and theater, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in "Grease." But he turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries.
Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie "Skatetown, U.S.A." The eclectic cast included Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormack and Billy Barty.
Swayze had a couple of movies in the works when his diagnosis was announced, including the drama "Powder Blue," starring Jessica Biel, Forest Whitaker and his younger brother, Don, which was scheduled for release this year.
Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on "man's greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature's laws," he told the AP in 2004.
Swayze was married since 1975 to Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center, People magazine reported in a cover story.
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Swayze's never-ending love affair: Adored by women the actor only ever had eyes for the wife he met when she was 14
By Alison Boshoff Last updated at 8:01 AM on 16th September 2009
He said that he wanted to die like a cowboy, with his boots on.
And Patrick Swayze, the Hollywood leading man who grew up as a ballet dancer in Texas, was born to a certain sort of toughness - in striking contrast to his romantic lead-role in Dirty Dancing, which made him globally famous.
His hobbies, until his illness, were strictly macho: riding bulls, racing cars, skydiving and taming horses.
He survived crashing his plane in the desert and a serious fall from a horse which temporarily paralysed him from the waist down.
To this high-risk list of pastimes one can add an addiction to alcohol, for which he spent a period in rehab, and a spell of cocaine use. The other hazard, of course, was his 60-a-day cigarette habit. To Swayze, whose father was a genuine cowboy, smoking was 'the last masculine ritual'.
He refused to quit even when diagnosed with cancer. Especially, as he said with a wry laugh, he had been told he only had 'five minutes to live' anyway.
Diagnosed with stage-4 pancreatic cancer in January 2008, doctors said he would probably be dead within a year. Pancreatic cancer is particularly aggressive, and remission is rare.
Swayze spent much of the last year of his life energetically denying he was going to die - while also making clear-headed preparations for the probability that he did not have much time left.
'You watch what I can pull off,' he joked. 'I want to last until they find a cure.' Sadly, no breakthrough came in time for him. But he survived for longer than doctors expected, passing away on Monday with his family by his side. He was 57.
Despite his illness, Swayze had decided to carry on filming the TV series The Beast, shuttling from his home in New Mexico to the set in Chicago for three months to play an FBI agent. On some days, filming went on for 12 hours.
He had chemotherapy between days on set and tried to build up his once muscular frame with protein shakes, but the disease's progress was apparent.
Swayze was frustrated by this treatment: 'With cancer we have nothing but caveman tools... You fight a monster with poison, but how much of that poison can your body take and you still keep functioning?'
His 6ft 2in frame, once corrugated with muscle, began to waste away. Within a few months he lost the physique which had helped to make him such a universal object of desire.
Yet he persisted with the gruelling filming schedule. No matter how bad he felt, Swayze said he refused to take painkilling medicine. 'When you're shooting, you can't do drugs,' he told an interviewer.
'I can't do Hydrocodone or Vicodin or these kinds of things that take the edge off [the pain], 'cause it takes the edge off your brain.'
In five months of filming, Swayze missed just one and a half days work.
After the series was complete, he retired to his ranch and spent time meditating, drinking freshly squeezed vegetable juice, and focusing on the healing power of crystals.
He also spent time with his horses and cattle, taking long rides into the mountains. Heart-throb: Patrick with Demi Moore in the famous potter's wheel scene in Ghost Swayze made it to his 34th wedding anniversary last June - which had been a major objective, and renewed his wedding vows with wife Lisa Niemi.
As was her wish, he rode to the ceremony on a white stallion, every inch the romantic lead who captured the hearts of millions in Dirty Dancing.
He had always been a fighter. Born on August 18, 1952, he was eight weeks premature. His mother believed he had not survived the birth. But, she recalled, he was handed to her by an Irish nun who said: 'Your baby was born with a star on his head' - meaning he was born lucky.
His father, Jesse, was a Texas State champion cowboy. His mother, Patsy, a dance teacher was driven and ambitious for her five children.
Swayze took after his father, a gentle but tough man who wore his heart on his sleeve. Jesse died of a heart attack at 56, too young to see his son's success.
Brought up in Houston, Texas, Swayze never felt he fitted in. 'We were the outsiders . . . My mother ran the only all-black dance troupe in the South, which made for an intense upbringing in itself.
'I turned up at junior school carrying a violin case with a pair of ballet shoes in my back pocket. You can imagine how I was treated,' he revealed.
Star in the making: A young Swayze taken in 1959 Swayze certainly seems to have started slowly when it came to girlfriends - his wife was the second woman he slept with.
They met when she was 14 and he 20, at the school for performing arts where she was his mother's star dance pupil. His mother was against the relationship: 'You mess up this kid, I'll kill you,' she told him.
The first time Swayze met Lisa he pinched her bottom. She was not impressed, slapping his face to repay him for his daring. He later said: 'Lisa was different from the girls I was used to. If I started putting on a pose or doing my Casanova routine, Lisa would turn away and not say anything.
'We had a lot of dates in silence. But as soon as I opened up about what I wanted from life, she would answer me. She was the smartest woman I ever met and I found that incredibly attractive.'
Soon after meeting Lisa, he moved to New York to be a ballet dancer. When Lisa came to New York, she moved in with him - but the romance remained unconsummated for a year.
'I had to propose before we felt our relationship was serious enough to have sex with each other,' he said.
Their relationship has been more romantic than any of his roles: he always maintained she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw, his best friend, and a better dancer than he.
Not long before his death, he paid tribute to her: 'I have no greater respect for any other human being on this earth like I have for her. Part of me says I couldn't have made it through without her, but, of course, the other part of me says I could have, but not nearly as elegantly as I have.'
People who knew them described them as two halves of the same whole. Kelly Lynch, Swayze's co-star in the 1989 film Road House, said: 'Like any great marriage, they seem to move together as one person.'
It was Swayze's role as dance instructor Johnny Castle in the low-budget film Dirty Dancing in 1987 that propelled him to fame.
His romantic, macho persona (who can forget the classic line 'Nobody puts Baby in the corner!') helped the film to become a phenomenon; it was the first to sell a million copies on video, and made more than $300 million.
And Swayze's status as a leading man was cemented in 1990 with his role in Ghost, alongside Demi Moore.
Indeed, Swayze was known as a consummate professional on set. But his fame brought its problems to his everyday life. Swayze found it 'incredibly alienating' - at times he needed bodyguards just to go to the grocery store. There were reports of a fling with a blonde stripper. Tragedy: Patrick Swayze died after a heroic two-year battle against cancer There were inevitably problems which came with the adulation. Swayze admitted that being named the world's sexiest man made him feel like a 'king for a day' and he needed Lisa to keep his feet on the ground. His wife had even endured death threats from fans.
Further lows came when Lisa had miscarriages in 1990 and 2005. Swayze had spoken of their lack of children as an abiding regret.
He also drank too heavily. One notable night out in London, after the premiere of Dirty Dancing, involved trashing his hotel room. More than once, Lisa threatened to leave him if he did not seek help.
This did not come until Swayze's sister, Vicky, committed suicide in 1994. She had been battling depression and had taken an overdose of painkillers.
Not long after her death, he checked in for treatment to help his problems with alcohol. But no sooner had Swayze got 'clean', than he faced his biggest physical challenge - a horse-riding accident which left him with two smashed legs, a damaged shoulder and his finger torn off. He had a dozen operations and his frame was rebuilt with titanium.
Despite this, Swayze confessed that he remained fascinated by risk and preoccupied by spiritual questions which his Hollywood career would never answer. He spent more and more time with his animals - 300 cattle, dogs, peacocks, chickens and the Arab horses.
Indeed, he was more of a curious character than his poster boy image would suggest.
He took on the role of a drag queen in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! - even though many actors thought playing a transvestite would be career suicide.
He also played a paedophile in the cult movie Donnie Darko, saying he hoped to break out of his stereotype as a leading man. For many years, he had also carried quartz and amethyst crystals on his person for their 'healing properties' and 'spiritual power'.
Last spring, he drew up a legally binding living trust to place all his assets in Lisa's hands. The trust also set out his wishes for the final stages of his life and the handling of his funeral. His last request was to be buried with his father and sister.
During the past year, the stricken actor had begun writing his memoirs with the help of his wife.
Swayze liked to describe himself as 'a wild man' and a 'powder keg'.
'I have demons in me. If I try to control those demons, they kill me... I have learnt to embrace those demons. That's why I jump out of aeroplanes and surf and ride, and test the skills I have.'
Swayze will be remembered as a Hollywood heart-throb, a blockbuster star, a thrill-seeker and a daredevil.
But, in the end, he believed his most important role was as devoted husband to Lisa, his most precious wife.
-------------------- Are we going somewhere or are you going to keep annoying me with your boring lectures professor-warrior?? Posts: 368 | Registered: Sep 2009
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