Dirty Dancing was a huge 80s hit, making huge stars of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, but the fiery passion of the movie couple on screen was not matched offscreen
Dirty Dancing is known for the fiery passion shared between co-stars Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. But when the cameras stopped rolling, one of Hollywood’s most iconic couples of the 80s did not see eye-to-eye.
The seeds of discontent were sewn in a movie the pair had worked on three years earlier, and could’ve made for a very different film had things gone Grey’s way. In her memoir, Grey confessed that she begged casting directors not to cast Swayze after clashing with him in 1984’s Red Dawn.
While the pair managed to put their previous differences to one side, things were far from rosy.
The romantic flick which, brace yourself, turns 38 this year, was set in 1960s America. In a nutshell, despite hoping to enjoy her youth while it lasts, Baby (Grey) finds herself at a sleepy rural resort in the Catskills, New York State in the US, with her parents.
It appears to be the typical family vacation, full of boring dinners with her mum and dad, along with silly activities, leaving her pretty fed up.
However, things improve significantly when the resort’s dance instructor, Johnny (Swayze), enlists Baby as his new partner, and the two fall in love.
Baby’s father forbids her from seeing Johnny, but she’s determined to help him perform the last big dance of the summer. He utters: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” They dance, he lifts, everything is lovely, and a million hearts were melted.
Unfortunately all this on-screen chemistry was just the work of very good acting, as the leads clashed throughout the making of this classic.
It was a rocky road to getting on the set in the first place for Swayze, who was the lesser of the two stars at the time. Grey and Swayze had played two teenage guerrillas in Red Dawn.
While the two sparked off each other on screen, it couldn’t have been further from the truth off camera. Grey even described Swayze as an unprofessional troublemaker. This in turn threatened his chances of landing the role, with Grey not wanting to work with Swayze again.
Discussing her Red Dawn experience she said: “Patrick was playing pranks on me and everybody…It was just, like, macho, and I just couldn’t take it. I was just like, ‘Please, this guy, that’s enough with him.'”
However, Swayze apologised in his screen test, winning Grey back and landing the role.
But new clashes came up on the new set.
Swayze opened up about his on-set aggravations with Grey due to his background as a professional dancer and the challenges he faced while partnering with her: “When we’re doing those dance sequences, and everything, and she’s crying, and she’s giggling, those moments really work because they’re real. They just took pieces of Patrick and Jennifer, working together as attempting to be a dance team, and my frustration. My real frustration. I’m trying to keep this girl serious. I’m trying to keep her from crying, trying to keep her focused, to get past her fear and her ego…”
During filming, Swayze’s annoyance with Grey grew progressively, mirroring Johnny’s frustrations in the film. One iconic scene captures Johnny tracing Baby’s arm, and Grey keeps laughing, disrupting the sequence; her laughter was authentic, while Swayze’s irritation, complete with improvised eye rolls and visible exasperation, was equally genuine.
It took roughly 20 tries to nail the scene, but it remained in the movie for its contribution to the characters’ on-screen tension.
However, over the years, while the pair’s opinions of each other mellowed significantly.
In Grey’s 2022 memoir, Out of the Corner, she wrote about their many rifts, and how if she could, she would apologize to Swayze, “I would say, ‘I’m so sorry that I couldn’t just appreciate and luxuriate in who you were, instead of me wishing you were more like what I wanted you to be…”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
