How a nose job put Dirty Dancing’s Baby in the corner
After the iconic film hit, Jennifer Grey was poised for mega-stardom… until she listened to cruel carping about her profile and took a decision that destroyed her career
IT WAS one of the most famous movie lines of the Eighties. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” was Patrick Swayze’s passionate declaration of devotion for his girlfriend, played by Jennifer Grey, in her star-making turn in Dirty Dancing, the 1987 smash hit about love, music and dance conquering all.
But with her career soaring and Hollywood at her feet, Grey underwent minor cosmetic surgery – and saw her world crumble around her.
“Overnight I lose my identity and my career,” writes Grey, aged 62, in her new memoir, Out Of The Corner.
After undergoing two minor nose jobs, she was horrified to find the small alterations had produced a rare but disastrous outcome: she was unrecognisable.
“I went in the operating theatre a celebrity and came out anonymous,” she says. “It was like being in a witness protection programme, or being invisible.”
Paparazzi who had followed her for months suddenly lowered their cameras when she stepped onto a red carpet.
An airline employee checking her driver’s licence before boarding said: “I’ve seen Dirty Dancing a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey. And you are not her.”
She became an international punchline, a cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris. “Being misunderstood on a global stage was very painful,” she told The New York Times.
Grey pulls no punches and spares herself no pity in a memoir that eviscerates and dissects her lowest moments, as well as her Hollywood highs.
The daughter of Oscar-winning Cabaret star Joel Grey, Jennifer had survived her wildchild years: “cocaine and Quaaludes,” older lovers and New York’s debauched Studio 54 nightclub – and had launched her film career. She appeared with Patrick Swayze in 1984’s Red Dawn, and played Matthew Broderick’s sister in 1986 hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, before Dirty Dancing made her a star. She played the innocent but serious daddy’s girl Frances “Baby” Houseman, beating Sharon Stone and Sarah Jessica Parker for the coveted role of a gawky teen falling in love with Swayze’s impoverished but honourable dance instructor. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” became the cri de coeur for a generation of disaffected teens, though it was a corny line Swayze hated.
“Patrick didn’t want to say it, and I didn’t blame him,” reveals Grey.
Her corkscrew perm became the musthave fashion statement of the summer of ’87, and the film’s hit song (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life topped the charts and won an Oscar. “After Dirty Dancing I was America’s sweetheart, which you would think would be the key to unlocking all my hopes and dreams,” Grey writes. But a cruel whispering campaign centred on the idea that Hollywood studios still struggled to see her as a leading lady because of her aquiline nose. “My so-called ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem for me, but it seemed to be a problem for other people,” she writes. “It was as plain as the nose on my face.”
BLOODHOUNDS of Broadway, her follow-up to Dirty Dancing, starred Madonna, proving a critical and box-office flop. Three years later her next film, Wind, was an even bigger disappointment.
Urged on by her mother, after consulting three plastic surgeons, Grey went under the knife in 1995 to “fine-tune” her nose, which was “truncated” and “dwarfed.” But when she guest starred on TV sit-com Friends soon after her surgery, her altered proboscis overshadowed her performance.
“It was the nose job from hell,” she says.
“I’ll always be this once-famous actress nobody recognises because of a nose job.”
Grey was also struggling with the aftermath of a car crash that left two people dead and her body wracked with pain. Her boyfriend, Ferris Bueller star Matthew Broderick, had been driving in Ireland with Grey in the passenger seat when he drifted into the oncoming lane, causing a fatal headon collision.
“There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about it,” she says. “That I don’t think about the families.”
The crash, just weeks before the premiere of Dirty Dancing, tore ligaments in Grey’s neck, leaving her plagued by painful headaches that lasted for days. Two decades later doctors found that the vertebrae in her neck had slipped, threatening to slice into her spinal cord, and ordered immediate surgery.
“There was no fluid around Jennifer’s spinal cord – none,” revealed her surgeon
‘There was a complex dynamic between Patrick and me. Tension is hotterlooking than love’
Dr Robert Bray. “If she fell, slipped… or experienced a sudden head movement or minor rear-end car accident, she could have been paralysed.”
She was ordered not to drive, work out, dance or play sports, until surgery in 2009 removed her slipped disc and locked her neck in place with a titanium plate.
“I had been suffering for so long and didn’t fully realise how pain had taken control of my life,” Grey admits.
“I stopped doing so many things that I loved, including dancing, because I didn’t want to make the pain worse.”
She underwent five more spinal surgeries, knee and foot surgery, and had a malignant thyroid tumour removed.
Amazingly, months after spinal surgery she joined the US cast of Dancing With The Stars in 2010 – and won.
Yet Hollywood had not forgiven her for changing her face, and her on-off career sputtered. There were appearances on Friends and medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, TV guest spots, low-budget films and a short-lived sit-com, but few leading roles in major movies.
AWAY from the cameras, Grey dated Michael J Fox and Johnny Depp, but her most memorable romantic moment remains when Patrick Swayze, who died of cancer in 2009, lifted her above his head and held her suspended in Dirty Dancing. Yet Grey reveals that what appeared to be on-screen chemistry was actually fierce antagonism between the co-stars.
“Tension is much hotter-looking than just love,” she says. “I think there was a very complex dynamic between
Patrick and myself for the whole movie.” Grey had taken a dislike to Swayze when they earlier starred in Red Dawn, a drama about a Third World War, where he was reportedly ordering everyone around. He was also a trained dancer, unlike Grey, who often required multiple takes for dance scenes. When Swayze ran his fingers tenderly down her arm in one scene she frustrated him by bursting into laughter in more than 20 takes, until the director finally decided to keep her giggles in the movie.
Grey married actor-director Clark Gregg in 2001, and they had one daughter, but in 2020 they separated. In the divorce settlement Grey kept all the Dirty Dancing residual payments that continue to roll in. She will reprise her role as Baby in a coming Dirty Dancing sequel, which producer Lionsgate promises, “will be exactly the kind of romantic, nostalgic movie the franchise’s fans have been waiting for”.
After years of feeling that she had been put in corners, Grey now recognises how she imposed such limitations on herself: “There were so many things I did choose.”
She finally feels more at ease with herself than ever.
“When I had all the good stuff, I was definitely not even close to how free I feel today,” she says. “One of the things I’ve understood as I’ve gotten older is how little I care what other people think of me. What I’m mostly concerned about is how I feel about myself.”
●●Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey (Ballantine Books, £19.99) is published on May 3. For free UK P&P on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com