In 1986, Gray landed a groundbreaking role as “Baby” Houseman in “Dirty Dancing,” a film about an uneasy teenager who falls in love with a handsome dance instructor (played by Patrick Swayze) while vacationing at a Catskills resort called Kellerman’s. Made on a budget of $6 million, the film earned $214 million at the box office and, as the DailyExpertNews film editor wrote on its 10th anniversary, “quickly became a phenomenon in a way no one has associated with it, even up to the present day.” Swayze’s phrase, “Nobody puts baby in the corner” became a rallying cry for disgruntled Generation Xers – who, it turned out, craved rumba, romance and nostalgia as much as anyone else. Cuffed, cropped jeans and white Keds became the official summer uniform. of any adolescent whose Sun-In and permanent is not rather reach the honey-colored waves of Grey. At the age of 27, after paying $50,000 for her work, she became a household name.
“After ‘Dirty Dancing,’ I was America’s sweetheart, which you would think would be the key to unlocking all my hopes and dreams,” writes Grey, daughter of Oscar-winning actor, Joel Grey, and granddaughter of Mickey. Katz, a comedian and musician who could have performed at Kellerman’s if it had been a real place. “But that’s not how it went. For starters, there didn’t seem to be a surplus of roles for actresses who looked like me. My so-called ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem for me, but since it seemed to be a problem for other people, and it didn’t seem to go away anytime soon, it became my problem by default.”
“It was as clear as the nose on my face,” she said.
On the advice of her mother and three plastic surgeons — one of whom remembers seeing “Dirty Dancing” and wondering “why that girl didn’t do her nose” — Gray underwent two surgeries to “fine-tune” her trunk. The second procedure, intended to correct an irregularity caused by the first, was more aggressive than Gray had expected. Her new nose was “truncated” and “reduced”. She was unrecognizable to people who had known her for years. Photographers who’d hounded her the month before didn’t pick up their cameras as she walked down a red carpet.
She remembers an airline employee who glanced at her driver’s license and said, “Oh, Jennifer Grey, just like the actress.” is me,” the woman replied, “I’ve seen Dirty Dancing a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey. And you’re not her.’”
“I lose my identity and my career overnight,” Gray writes.
In the two hours that she sat on a blue couch in a Beverly Hills restaurant, businesslike scooping a soft-boiled egg, spreading butter on rye toast, and talking about her memoirs, only one person seemed to recognize Grey. The woman’s face lit up, then softened as if she had seen an old friend who had survived a terrible ordeal.