Dirty Dancing Star Jen Grey’s career took a nose dive after a rhinoplasty
Dirty dancing actress Jennifer Gray was tipped to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood after she shot to fame in the big hit movie… until she got a nose job.
But after her iconic role as Frances ‘Baby’ Huisman in the 1987 film next to it Patrick Swayzeshe foolishly followed her mother’s advice to get a rhinoplasty, in the mistaken belief that she would look more conventional and get more leading roles. RadarOnline.com can reveal.
However, it failed and her career plummeted, but now she is back in the Oscar-winning film decades later A real pain and we chart her career from Dirty Dancing heartthrob to sitcom dud and her return to the top.
The 64-year-old Gray calls the operation the biggest mistake of her life.
“Overnight I lost my identity and my career,” she said.
The actress was tipped for greatness, considering the massive success that came with it Dirty dancing had enjoyed.
Still a combination of the fateful rhinoplasty, her injuries from a car accident and the rest tensions with Swayze meant that the fame she had was very much of the unwanted kind.
She became the butt of jokes on late-night chat shows, and when she cautiously restarted her acting career, a sitcom she appeared in featured a discussion about her nose job as a running gag. She could have been forgiven for fleeing the industry and leaving it all behind.
However, Gray is back in the spotlight with a high-profile role in Jesse Eisenberg’s dark comedy. A real painin which she plays Marcia, part of a Holocaust tour group in which the characters Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin participate.
A Real pain has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim and is tipped for release heavy in awards season later this year, with Gray a clear shot at a Best Supporting Actress nomination.
Hollywood loves a comeback, as the recent Oscar for Brendan Fraser proved, and Grey’s rollercoaster story will undoubtedly be loved by voters. But what went so wrong in the first place?
Gray was born into show business. Her father Joel is an Oscar-winning actor best known for playing the devilish MC in Bob Fosse’s Cabaretand her mother Jo was an actress and singer.
Her early trajectory was normal, if privileged; private school in New York, after which she trained in acting, when she supported herself by working as a waitress. The first role she played of any significance was in the war drama Red Dawn in 1984, after being part of a bit Francis Ford Coppola jazz crime photo The Cotton Cluband she seemed to be facing her future Dirty dancing co-star Swayze.
However, she gained more public attention with her sparkling and dynamic performance in Ferris Bueller’s day offin which she played Jeanie Bueller, Ferris’ cynical older sister, and the only member of his family who can see through his schemes and tricks.
Gray, who began what she later called “a clandestine set romance” with her co-star Matthew Broderick, was one of the standouts of a critically acclaimed film.
And so, future opportunities presented themselves to her, including the chance to audition for a new musical romance. Dirty dancingabout the relationship between a privileged teenager and a working-class dance teacher.
Swayze and Gray did not hit it off on set Red Dawnand she reacted badly to the idea of having to act opposite him again. “Patrick played pranks on me and everyone,” she said. “It was just macho, and I just couldn’t stand it. I thought, ‘Please, this guy, that’s enough with him’.”
Swayze, seeing the potential loss of a similar star role, apologized to her.
The two made the film together, but the on-screen chemistry didn’t translate to the off-screen relationship.
“Just like Baby and Johnny weren’t supposed to be together, they weren’t a natural… a natural match, right? And we weren’t a natural match,” Gray later said.
“And the fact that we had to be a natural match created tension. Because normally, if someone isn’t a natural match, you… both move on, but we were forced to be together.”
Filming Dirty dancing may have been an unsatisfactory experience, but it was, predictably, a huge success when it was released in August 1987, eventually grossing $214 million at the global box office.
Gray couldn’t enjoy the fruits of fame because she was involved in a car accident in Ireland with Broderick a few weeks before its release. The pair had chosen to keep their relationship a secret but it was revealed publicly in the most disastrous way after the actor, driving a rented BMW, was involved in a head-on collision that killed a mother and daughter instantly. .
Gray suffered whiplash and Broderick was convicted of reckless driving and fined.
She said: “It’s very difficult to describe when you have a near-death experience and are present for other people’s deaths. Being alone on a country road in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around or conscious was quite terrifying… It led to so many other things in my life.”
Then came the rhinoplasty and she suggested the reason for it was because she felt ugly and conspicuous; despite her presence in a box office hit, “there was no surplus of roles for actresses who looked like me”.
While a plastic surgeon publicly mused about why she hadn’t had a rhinoplasty, she decided, urged by her mother, that it was the only viable option.
As she later wrote, “My so-called ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem to me, but since it seemed like a problem to other people, and it didn’t seem to go away anytime soon, it became my problem by default. It was as obvious as the nose on my face.”
But Gray was rendered virtually unrecognizable after her nose was, in her description, “truncated” and “reduced”.
Photographers didn’t recognize her on the red carpet, and her fellow actors didn’t remember who she was either.
Overnight, she became first a joke and then a cautionary tale.
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