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It’s one of the most iconic movie lines of all time – but it almost didn’t happen, actress Jennifer Grey says.
The 62-year-old, who played Frances "Baby" Houseman in the iconic 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, has revealed that co-star Patrick Swayze, who played Baby's dance teacher and love interest Johnny Castle, "strenuously resisted" saying the line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."
In her new memoir, Out of the Corner, Jennifer added that Patrick, who died in 2009 aged 57 from pancreatic cancer, had issues with other parts of the script as well.
He thought the line sounded cheesy, Patrick revealed in The Time of My Life, the memoir published in 2009 that he co-wrote with his wife, Lisa Niemi.
“I could hardly bring myself to say it. It sounded so corny. But seeing the finished film, I had to admit it worked.”
In Out of the Corner Jennifer reveals that she and her hunky co-star didn't get along. They'd worked together before in the 1984 action film Red Dawn and she disliked him because he played pranks on her and the rest of the cast and was often late for filming.
But she adds that this friction fuelled Dirty Dancing, making up for the lack of natural chemistry.
“The same way Baby and Johnny weren't supposed to be together – they weren’t . . . a natural match, right? – we weren’t a natural match,” she told People magazine.
“And the fact we needed to be a natural match created a tension. Because, no, normally when someone’s not a natural [match] . . . both people move on, but we were forced to be together. And our being forced to be together created a kind of a synergy, or like a friction.
She also shares in her book how getting a nose job in the early '90s ruined her career as it left her unrecognisable. She took the big step after years of her mother, the former actress Jo Wilder, urging her to get the surgery.
“The first time I had gone out in public, [actor] Michael Douglas, who I'd known for years, didn't recognise me,” she told People.
“And it became the thing, the idea of being completely invisible, from one day to the next. In the world's eyes, I was no longer me.”
“Overnight I lose my identity and my career," she writes in her memoir.
SOURCES: DAILYMAIL.CO.UK, YAHOO.COM, PEOPLE
