Jennifer Grey

Dirty Dancing turned a $5 million budget into the first film to sell one million copies on VHS. Grey was paid $50,000 for it. As Baby Houseman, she earned a Golden Globe nomination and a cultural moment that hasn't stopped selling merchandise. The timing was brutal: just weeks before the 1987 release, she was in a head-on crash in Northern Ireland with then-boyfriend Matthew Broderick that killed two women. She has called it "top three traumas of my life, maybe top one."

The nose job became one of Hollywood's most cited cautionary tales. Two rhinoplasty procedures in the early '90s left her unrecognizable to friends, photographers, and casting directors. Michael Douglas reportedly didn't recognize her at a premiere. Her 2022 memoir Out of the Corner became a New York Times bestseller. The Dirty Dancing sequel has her back as star and executive producer, which is either a victory lap or a second chance, depending on how the last three decades read to you.

Her father is Joel Grey, who won the Oscar for Cabaret, so the performing arts dynasty was never accidental. A brief engagement to Johnny Depp in the late '80s barely registers now. She won Dancing with the Stars Season 11 in 2010 while finishing the finale with a ruptured disc in her back, and that process revealed the 1987 crash had left cervical spine damage she'd been carrying for over two decades. The body was keeping score even when the industry wasn't.