Dirty Dancing star loses battle to pancreatic cancer at 57

He even went on to star in The Beast,a drama series. He filmed a complete season while undergoing treatment. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” he said. “You go to work.”

A week before the series began,Swayze appeared on the Barbara Walters Special on ABC. “I keep my heart and my soul and my spirit open to miracles,” he told Walters. But he said he was not going to pursue every experimental treatment. If he were to “spend so much time chasing staying alive,” he said,he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the time he had left. “I want to live,” he said.

Swayze received attention in several early movies and in the mini-series North and South,but Dirty Dancing (1987) established him as a leading man. He starred opposite Jennifer Grey as a young working-class dance instructor at a Catskills resort who had more heart,integrity and sex appeal than the wealthy guests with whom he was forbidden to fraternise.

He exhibited similar intensity in Ghost (1990),an enormous box-office hit. His character,a loft-living yuppie banker,is murdered early in the film and spends the rest of it as a spirit,trying to communicate with his fiancée (Demi Moore) with the help of a psychic (Whoopi Goldberg).

Swayze was proud of Ghost,as he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I needed to do something that will affect the audience in a positive way,make them feel better about their lives and appreciate what they have,” he said. His first notable film was The Outsiders (1983),a drama about teenage gangs that starred newcomers like Tom Cruise,Rob Lowe,Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez.

To Wong Foo,where he played a drag queen,earned him his third Golden Globe nomination. The others were for Dirty Dancing and Ghost.

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on August 18,1952,in Houston,to Jesse Wayne Swayze,an engineer,and Patsy Swayze,a dance instructor. Swayze married Lisa Niemi 1975. She survives him,along with his mother,two brothers and a sister.

Swayze was determined to avoid typecasts. He said,“The only plan I have is that every time people think they have me pegged,I’m going to come out of left field and do something unexpected.” He was also concerned about superficiality. “One of the reasons I bought my ranch was because I didn’t want to hear the hype,” he said. He added,“Your horses don’t lie to you.”