Patrick Swayze^†

Dirty Dancing wasn't supposed to last a weekend. The 1987 low-budget film was slated for a quick theatrical run before going straight to video, but it became the first movie to sell one million copies on home video and earned over $214 million worldwide. Swayze was a classically trained ballet dancer who'd performed professionally with Disney and played Danny Zuko on Broadway before any of this, bringing Johnny Castle a physicality and sincerity nobody expected. He co-wrote "She's Like the Wind" for the soundtrack, which hit number three on the Billboard Hot 100.

Ghost (1990) became the highest-grossing film of that year, and People named him Sexiest Man Alive in 1991. Then the trajectory bent. The action career cooled through the mid-90s, and he fought alcoholism quietly after losing his father and later his sister. He came back to public attention in 2008, not with a film, but with a Stage IV pancreatic cancer diagnosis that doctors gave five months to live. He worked through chemotherapy on the A&E series The Beast, outlived that prognosis by more than a year, and his very public fight helped draw attention to a disease that had almost no dedicated research program in the U.S. at the time.

He trained in classical ballet as a kid in Houston, where his mother ran the city's jazz ballet company, and got teased relentlessly for it by classmates. For Point Break, he went skydiving more than fifty times to prepare for his role, until the film's insurance company made him stop. He also held an FAA pilot's license with an instrument rating, which proved useful once when a pressurization failure forced him to land his twin-engine Cessna on an empty street in Arizona. His carpentry business with wife Lisa Niemi was called Nepotism, Inc., because they only hired family.

His memoir, The Time of My Life, co-written with Lisa Niemi, was published posthumously in October 2009. Niemi became a Pancreatic Cancer Action Network ambassador after his death and continued advocating for research funding. A documentary, I Am Patrick Swayze, debuted on Paramount Network on his birthday in August 2019, featuring Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and Jennifer Grey.