He was the decent American expatriate in Calcutta in Roland Joffé's City of Joy (1992), and the wacky drag artist in Beeban Kidron's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). Typecasting, and a battle with alcoholism, hampered any rise to the top. Nevertheless, he reportedly turned down an offer of $7m to appear in a Dirty Dancing sequel and, when criticised for his choice of film roles, said that he was "fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality". A workmanlike career unfolded, without letting Swayze's personality cohere into a clear star-identity. This film, too, partook a little of the changing zeitgeist: Swayze's gentle phantom yuppie showed an America interested in a more vulnerable, caring leading man as an antidote to the triumphalist 1980s.Īfter these movies, Swayze never quite progressed to the A-list, though he did well as the charismatic surfer-dude in Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action-thriller Point Break, opposite Keanu Reeves.
It became America's favourite date movie, with a much-loved, much-parodied scene in which a half-naked Sam embraces Molly from behind as she caresses an oozing brown pot upwards into shape, to the accompaniment of the Righteous Brothers singing Unchained Melody. Sam is killed by a mugger in the movie's sensational opening scene, but returns as a ghost to watch over the love of his life. Three years later, in Ghost (1990), Swayze was Sam Wheat, a yuppie banker deeply in love with his ceramic-artist fiancee Molly, played by Demi Moore.
The image of the blonde princess emotionally liberated by the bad boy with the heart of gold was adored by movie audiences: it was irresistibly similar to that of Diana, Princess of Wales, dancing with John Travolta at the White House two years before. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" he declares, and whisks her centre-stage for some spectacular choreography. At the end of the movie, Johnny strides into the dance hall to find that she has been forced to sit demurely with her parents at a table well away from the action.
In Dirty Dancing (1987), he was Johnny Castle, a summer-camp dance teacher from the wrong side of the tracks who falls in love with one of his pupils, Frances "Baby" Houseman, a teenage girl from a posh, uptight family, whose world is rocked by Johnny's steamy dance moves. Patrick Swayze, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 57, was a leading man with rugged, unpretty looks and a lean dancer's physique, who enjoyed staggering success in Reagan-Bush-era America thanks to two classic movie roles.