Memorial Page for Patrick Swayze (née Patrick Wayne Swayze)

Patrick Swayze (born 18 August 1952 in Houston, Texas; died 14 September 2009 in Los Angeles) was an American actor, dancer and singer. As dance instructor Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing and as Sam Wheat in Ghost, he became one of the best-known faces in cinema at the end of the 1980s. Trained as a classical ballet dancer, he brought a rare blend of strength and grace to the screen: he could dance, fight, ride and fly, and he did much of it himself. At his side for 34 years, from his mother's dance school until his death, was his wife Lisa Niemi.

Houston: his mother's dance school

Patrick Wayne Swayze was the second of five children. His mother, Patsy Swayze, ran her own dance school in Houston and the Houston Jazz Ballet Company, taught at the University of Houston for eighteen years and later choreographed films such as Urban Cowboy. His father, Jesse Wayne Swayze, was an engineering draftsman. All five children became dancers and actors; his younger brother Don Swayze later worked in front of the camera too. Patrick began dancing in his mother's studio as soon as he could walk. As a boy he ice-skated, studied classical ballet and acted in school productions. At Waltrip High School he played football and hoped for a scholarship, until a serious knee injury ended that path. He went on to San Jacinto College on a gymnastics scholarship and trained in martial arts on the side.

Lisa

In 1970 a fourteen-year-old student joined Patsy Swayze's dance school: Lisa Haapaniemi, the only daughter of a Finnish-American family from Houston. Patrick was eighteen. The two became a couple and married on 12 June 1975 in Houston, with the reception held at his mother's dance studio. Lisa later shortened her surname to Niemi for the stage. The marriage lasted 34 years, until his death. The couple had no children. They danced together in New York, made films together, ran a construction business and bred horses. In a 2008 interview Swayze said that Lisa had inspired his best-known song, She's Like the Wind.

New York, Broadway and the first films

In 1972, at the age of twenty, Swayze moved to New York to complete his dance training at the schools of the Harkness Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet, and for a time he danced with the Eliot Feld Ballet. His damaged knee, however, made a career as a ballet dancer impossible. His first professional appearance was as the prince in the Disney show Disney on Parade; in the late 1970s he took over the role of Danny Zuko in Grease on Broadway. His film debut followed in 1979 as the roller skater Ace in Skatetown, U.S.A., and in 1981 he appeared in an episode of M*A*S*H.

In 1983 Francis Ford Coppola cast him in The Outsiders as Darrel "Darry" Curtis, in an ensemble with Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Ralph Macchio. That same year he appeared alongside Gene Hackman in Uncommon Valor, and in 1984 in John Milius's Red Dawn, where he stood in front of the camera with Jennifer Grey for the first time. Television brought the breakthrough: from 3 November 1985 ABC aired the Civil War saga North and South with Swayze as the Southerner Orry Main, to this day one of the most-watched miniseries in American television history. Kirstie Alley and James Read, who became a close friend, starred alongside him; guest roles went to James Stewart, Olivia de Havilland and Johnny Cash, among others. In Germany the series aired on ZDF in 1987, with individual episodes drawing more than 20 million viewers.

Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing was a small film. The studio planned to show it in cinemas for a week and then send it to video. Swayze played Johnny Castle, the dance instructor at a holiday resort in the summer of 1963 who falls in love with a guest's seventeen-year-old daughter, Frances "Baby" Houseman, played by Jennifer Grey. For the first time, cinema audiences saw what Swayze could do: he did not dance like an actor who had learned it, but like someone who had grown up with it. Filming took place in Lake Lure, North Carolina, and at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia. The famous lift in the lake was shot in cold water, over and over; in his autobiography he described the lake as "horrifyingly, hypothermically cold". The film opened in American cinemas on 21 August 1987 and went on to earn more than 214 million dollars worldwide. It was the first film to sell more than a million copies on video, and it brought Swayze his first Golden Globe nomination. For the soundtrack he sang She's Like the Wind, which he had written years earlier with Stacy Widelitz for the film Grandview, U.S.A.; the song reached number three in the United States and number fourteen in Germany. Baby's father was played by Jerry Orbach.

In Germany Dirty Dancing opened on 8 October 1987 and, with around 8.7 million admissions, became the most successful film of the year; it remains one of the most-watched films ever shown in German cinemas. On 30 June 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it reached cinemas in East Germany, where more than three million people saw it. The stage musical based on the film later ran for years in Hamburg, Berlin and Oberhausen and toured Germany and Austria. In December 2024 the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry, its archive of America's most culturally significant films.

Ghost and the years as a global star

After Dirty Dancing, Swayze was in demand as never before. In 1989 he played Dalton in Road House, a bouncer who cleans up a bar in Missouri and takes on the town's businessman, played by Ben Gazzara; he performed many of his own stunts. Critics panned the film, audiences loved it, and over the years it became a cult classic. The thriller Next of Kin with Liam Neeson and Bill Paxton followed the same year.

Ghost opened on 13 July 1990. Swayze plays the banker Sam Wheat, who is attacked on the street and dies, but stays on as a ghost beside his girlfriend Molly, played by Demi Moore. He cannot touch her; she cannot see him. Only one person can hear him: the psychic Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi Goldberg. That Goldberg got the part was down to Swayze, who had convinced the producers to cast her. When she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on 25 March 1991, she thanked him in her speech in front of the whole world. With around 505 million dollars, Ghost became the highest-grossing film of 1990 worldwide; it received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and was the most-rented video in the United States in 1991. The scene at the pottery wheel remains one of the best-known moments in cinema. Swayze received his second Golden Globe nomination. In Germany almost four million people saw the film.

In 1991 came Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow: Swayze as the leader of a gang of surfing bank robbers, Keanu Reeves as an undercover FBI agent. Swayze performed many of the film's skydiving jumps himself. That same year People magazine named him "Sexiest Man Alive". In 1992 he shot City of Joy with Roland Joffé, set in the slums of India.

The 1990s: setbacks and a star

In 1995 he showed two very different sides: the cowboy Pecos Bill in the Disney adventure Tall Tale and a drag queen in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo – his third Golden Globe nomination. Then things grew quieter around him. After the death of his father, who had suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982 at the age of 57, Swayze had been drinking too much; he later spoke openly about those years. When his older sister Vicky died in 1994, he went into rehabilitation and took a three-year break from film. He spent most of that time on his ranches in California and New Mexico, where he bred Arabian horses.

In September 1996 he stood beside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Moscow at the opening of a Planet Hollywood restaurant. In May 1997, while filming Letters from a Killer, he fell from a horse into a tree and broke both legs; filming was suspended for two months. Three months later, on his 45th birthday, 18 August 1997, he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 7018 Hollywood Boulevard. He returned to the screen in 1998 as the trucker Jack Crews in Black Dog.

Ranch, horses and the stage

Swayze held a pilot's licence with an instrument rating and flew between his ranches himself, as did Lisa. His best-known horse was the Arabian stallion Tammen. In 2001 he surprised audiences in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko as the motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, in a film that only became a cult favourite over the years. The title role was played by nineteen-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal, who never forgot how Swayze treated the newcomer: "He didn't have to take the time, but he always did." In 2003 Lisa Niemi filmed her own play about three dancers in New York: One Last Dance, with Swayze and herself in the lead roles, choreographed by his mother Patsy. In 2004 he made a brief appearance as a dance instructor in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.

His training as a dancer kept drawing him back to the stage. He had already appeared on Broadway in Goodtime Charley in 1975, and later played Billy Flynn there in the musical Chicago. On 27 July 2006 he made his West End debut as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls in London and stayed in the role until 25 November. In 2009 he appeared in Powder Blue, his first film together with his brother Don.

The illness

Shortly after taking the lead role in the television series The Beast at the end of 2007, Swayze felt a burning in his abdomen. In January 2008 came the diagnosis: pancreatic cancer at an advanced stage. He was treated at Stanford University and kept filming, in Chicago, twelve hours a day, with chemotherapy at the weekends; in five months he missed a day and a half of work. In September 2008 he appeared on the television broadcast Stand Up to Cancer and said: "I dream that the word 'cure' will no longer be followed by the words 'it's impossible'." In January 2009 he spoke openly with Barbara Walters about his illness and about the smoking that, in his view, had contributed to it. The Beast premiered on A&E on 15 January 2009; critics praised him, and the series ended after one season. Lisa directed one of the episodes.

Farewell

Patrick Swayze died on 14 September 2009 at home, surrounded by his family, twenty months after the diagnosis. He was 57 years old, the same age as his father. In keeping with his wishes, his ashes were to be scattered on his ranch in New Mexico, beneath his favourite mountain. Two weeks later his autobiography The Time of My Life was published, written together with Lisa and completed shortly before his death; it became a bestseller. After his death Lisa Niemi became an ambassador for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, which raises awareness of the disease, and in 2012 wrote a second book, Worth Fighting For – about love, loss and the road that follows.

Legacy

On 21 November 2009 a memorial stone was dedicated to him at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia, where Dirty Dancing had been filmed. After his death Whoopi Goldberg said: "Patrick was a really good man, a funny man and one to whom I owe much that I can't ever repay. I believe in Ghost's message, so he'll always be near." When Jake Gyllenhaal took over Swayze's old role in the 2024 remake of Road House, his character wore a small tattoo on his forearm: the initials P.S. "I tried to carry him with me," Gyllenhaal said.

In 2022, thirteen years after his death, Lisa Niemi said: "I feel like he's with me every day, but of course it'd be nice to have him physically." And: "Just because you lose someone doesn't mean love stops." They are words that recall the film with which Patrick Swayze touched the most people. At the end of Ghost, before he walks into the light, Sam Wheat says: "The love inside, you take it with you."