Jennifer Grey with her Dirty Dancing co-star Patrick Swayze at a party after the showing of the 1987 movie. Photo / Getty Images
A disastrous operation killed the 1980s star’s career overnight. She’s now back in an Oscar-tipped film – but where has she been?
It always used to be that the most famous nose in human history was that of Cleopatra’s, which was held up to be surprisingly large and out of proportion to the rest of her face. Still, as the philosopher Pascal wrote: “Cleopatra’s nose – had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”
Two millennia later, there was another nose that, in a wildly different era, came to be just as keenly discussed, pored over and dissected, and that was the one that belonged to the Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey. After she appeared in the hit 1987 romantic drama, she had a rhinoplasty at her mother’s instigation a few years later, in the mistaken belief that she would become more conventional-looking and would find more leading roles.
It backfired, horribly. Grey is on record as calling it the greatest mistake of her life. “Overnight I [lost] my identity and my career,” she said. The actress had been tipped to be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, given the enormous success that Dirty Dancing had enjoyed. Yet a combination of the ill-fated nose job, her injuries from a fatal car crash and residual tensions with her co-star Patrick Swayze meant that the fame that she had was very much of the undesirable kind. She became a butt of jokes on late-night chat shows, and when she tentatively restarted her acting career, one sitcom in which she appeared featured discussion of her nose job as a running gag. She could have been forgiven for fleeing the industry and abandoning it all.
However, Grey has returned to prominence with a high-profile role in Jesse Eisenberg’s dark comedy, A Real Pain, in which she plays Marcia, part of a Holocaust tour group that the Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin characters are participating in.
A Real Pain has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim and is being tipped to figure heavily in the awards season later this year, with Grey a distinct possibility for a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Hollywood loves a comeback, as the recent Oscar for Brendan Fraser proved; Grey’s rollercoaster narrative will undoubtedly endear itself to voters. But what went so wrong in the first place?
Grey was born into show business. Her father Joel is an Oscar-winning actor best known for the role of the diabolical MC in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and her mother Jo was an actress and singer. Her early trajectory was unexceptional, if privileged; private school in New York, then acting training, when she supported herself working as a waitress. The first role that she had of any significance was in the war drama Red Dawn in 1984, after a bit part in Francis Ford Coppola’s jazz crime picture The Cotton Club, and she appeared opposite her future Dirty Dancing co-star Patrick Swayze.
However, she came to greater public attention with her sparky and dynamic performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which she played Jeanie Bueller, Ferris’s cynical older sister, and the only member of his family who is able to see through his schemes and ploys. One of the most memorable scenes in the film involved her having an interaction at a police station with a young Charlie Sheen – who would go on his own remarkable journey over the coming decades – in which he persuades her to look at life in a different, more open-minded way, and to be more generous-spirited towards her younger brother.
Grey, who began what she later called “a clandestine set romance” with her co-star Matthew Broderick, was one of the stand-out features of a widely acclaimed film. And so future opportunities presented themselves to her, including the chance to audition for a new musical romance, Dirty Dancing, about the relationship between a privileged teenager and a working-class dance instructor. Broderick, however, was dismissive about the chances of her winning the role and potentially overshadowing his own success. “I don’t know what I’m worried about,” she recalled telling herself. “There’s no way you’re gonna get it. I’m sure they’re seeing everybody for this part.”
There was another problem. Swayze and Grey had not hit it off on the set of Red Dawn, and she responded poorly to the idea of having to act opposite him again. “Patrick was playing pranks on me and everybody,” she said. “It was just, like, macho, and I just couldn’t take it. I was just like, ‘Please, this guy, that’s enough with him.’”
Swayze, seeing the potential loss of a similarly star-making role, emotionally apologised to her. In her recollection, he said “I love you, I love you, and I’m so sorry. And I know you don’t want me to do the movie … And he got the tears in his eyes. And I got the tears in my eyes — not for the same reason. I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s working me … And he goes, ‘We could kill it — we could kill it if we did this.’”
The two made the film together, but the chemistry on-screen did not translate into the off-screen relationship. “The same way Baby and Johnny were not supposed to be together, they weren’t natural… a natural match, right? And we weren’t a natural match,” Grey later said. “And the fact that we needed to be a natural match created a tension. Because normally when someone’s not a natural, you… both people move on, but we were forced to be together.” She caused this “friction”, and explained that “the weird thing was, it’s like, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I mean, I was not lacking. And he was married and very in love with his wife. Whatever he was doing, I was not… I was very busy with Matthew [Broderick]. Like, what could be more different.”
Filming Dirty Dancing may have been a dissatisfying experience, but it was, predictably, an enormous success when it was released in August 1987, eventually going on to earn US$214 million ($352m) at the global box office. Yet Grey was unable to enjoy the fruits of its acclaim because, a couple of weeks before it came out, she was involved in a car crash in Ireland with Broderick. The pair had chosen to keep their relationship secret, but it was revealed publicly in the most disastrous of fashions after the actor, who was driving a rented BMW, was involved in a head-on collision with a mother and daughter, who were killed instantly.
Grey suffered whiplash, and Broderick was convicted of careless driving and fined. Yet the emotional impact was vastly more severe than the physical pain. She later called it the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to her: “It’s very hard to describe when you have a near-death experience and are present for the death of other people. Being alone on a country road in the middle of nowhere with nobody else around or conscious was pretty terrifying … It led to so many other things in my life.”
One of these, coincidentally or otherwise, was her decision to get the most talked-about nose job in Hollywood. She referred to it in her 2022 memoir Out of the Corner as “schnozageddon”, and suggested that her reason for having it was that she felt ugly and conspicuous; despite her presence in a box office smash, “there was not a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me.”
As one plastic surgeon publicly mused why she hadn’t had a nose job, she decided, egged on by her mother, that it was the only viable option. As she later wrote: “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 appear to be going away anytime soon, by default it became my problem. It was as plain as the nose on my face.”
The procedure was referred to as “fine-tuning” by surgeons, but it was anything but. It required two painful bouts of rhinoplasty, and when it was finished, Grey was rendered virtually unrecognisable, after her nose had been, in her description, “truncated” and “dwarfed”. One issue that Grey dealt with in her memoir was that, before the operation, her nose made her look ethnically Jewish – a key plot point in Dirty Dancing – but she did not want to be stereotyped into such roles in the future. Unfortunately, once the operation was concluded, she may not have looked Jewish, but she also did not look like Jennifer Grey, either. Photographers failed to recognise her on the red carpet, and her fellow actors did not remember who she was, either.
Overnight, she became first a joke, then a cautionary tale about vanity. She later likened the experience to being in a witness protection programme, and watched her career decline inexorably. She became more famous for the men she dated post-Broderick, who included Johnny Depp, Michael J Fox and William Baldwin, than anything that she did in television or film. Even an appearance in the sitcom It’s Like, You Know… as herself proved to be as much an opportunity for mockery as exposure, as her rhinoplasty came to define her character.
In any case, the show was not a great success, and although Grey had a small role in Friends, her highest-profile endeavours had little to do with acting. She married Clark Gregg, who would become famous through his recurring Marvel role as Agent Phil Coulson, and won the 2010 series of Dancing with the Stars, leading to another career in reality television. Yet she was a personality, not an actor, and treated as such, until her memoir did a fine job of setting out her side of the story.
Her re-emergence with A Real Pain may, or may not, lead to the career resurgence that she deserves. It has been suggested that she will be returning in a belated Dirty Dancing sequel, to be directed by Warm Bodies filmmaker Jonathan Levine, but she recently commented that “I can’t tell you much about Dirty Dancing as I’m not going to make promises. I’m just waiting for them to really nail it down as it has to be right.”
The absence of the late Swayze might make such a picture impossible – it has been suggested that he will be featured in some way, although please spare us another posthumous piece of CGI-led necrophilia – but Grey has long since forgiven her former dancing and sparring partner. If she could talk to him again, “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’.”
Much the same could be said of her and her difficult, combative relationship with an industry that chewed her up and spat her out without pity. It would be a fitting Hollywood happy ending if, after everything, Jennifer Grey was to have the last laugh, after all. After all, nobody puts baby in the corner.
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.