patrick swayze he stepped on a stage even before he learned to walk. When she was just a few months old, her mother, a well-known dance teacher named Patsy, he brought it up one day on stage in an operetta. “My father [un antiguo jinete de rodeos] He wanted me to be a cowboy and an athlete,” said the actor. “My mother did not believe that someone could be called an artist until they knew well the different levels of the arts. So I tried them all.” Encouraged by Patsy, the Texan actor began taking classes at her dance school while still a child. Like many of his classmates made fun of him for that hobby, His mother also enrolled him in martial arts classes so that he would learn how to defend himself against bullies. “My parents only accepted a first place, and I had to achieve it,” she once recounted. “I thought I was just a machine, and I didn’t know if there was something inside of me that anyone would be interested in, so I had self-esteem issues.” What Patsy never taught her son was to defend himself against the blows that she herself habitually dealt him. Swayze himself recounted that, during his 18th birthday party, his mother was beating him up when his father, Jesse, who saw her doing it, threatened to divorce her if she touched him again. “She never hit him again after that,” the actress and dancer explained to People. Lisa Niemi, that he met the actor at Patsy’s academy when she was only 15 years old and the boy was about to turn 20. To escape his frustrations, and in the process shed the effeminate label, the athletic Swayze began spending time with another of his great hobbies: football. Until, during a match, he injured his knee and had to undergo surgery. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at San Jacinto College on a scholarship in gymnastics, but she didn’t even finish first grade, because he was hired to work as a dancer in the show Disney on Parade.after passing a year playing the prince of Snow White in the United States and Canada, Swayze returned home to Houston. It was then that he began dating Lisa Niemi, with whom he fell madly in love and married in June 1975. Before the wedding, held in the garden of her family’s home in Houston, Swayze moved to a modest apartment in New York to study dance. But her The shattered knee continued to give Swayze headaches, and he even nearly lost his leg. “I had four operations,” he said in an interview. “As much as the knee injury seemed like it was going to destroy my life, on the other hand, it was the best thing that could happen to me, because it forced me to look inside myself. And that’s what led me to acting.” Swayze did well on Broadway, where he was able to work in productions like West Side Story or Goodtime Charlie, but What gave him the most popularity was playing the role of Danny Zuko in Grease. Not surprisingly, the success of this work gave him the confidence to believe that he could move to the mecca of cinema, and succeed as an actor there. That was how, in 1979, with barely 1,500 euros saved, Patrick and Lisa left for Los Angeles. “We had to fight a lot,” he assured a journalist. “I worked in a steel plant, I worked as a clerk in a grocery store,… We liked carpentry, and we set up a business together.” The actor finally made the leap to the big screen in Skate Fever (1979) , where he played the sexy leader of a group of skaters. There he cultivated a certain fame as a heartthrob, although he, knowing that these types of signs are usually too ephemeral, rejected the label. “After skate fever I signed four contracts with Columbia, and they offered me another six films”, he told about that stage. “I turned them down. I was scared to do it because…what if it was my ‘big break’? But I dove right into acting classes.”
Stage of self-destruction and overflowing fame
Even then, that stocky blond longed for the respect of critics and his fellow professionals. And his big break came the day the director Francis Ford Coppola he selected him for a drama called Rebeldes (1983), where by the way he coincided with other young actors (Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon either Rob Lowe) that, from that moment, would become part of the Olympus of cinema. Outside of filming, Swayze was fighting tooth and nail to boost his self-esteem. “I devoted myself body and soul to being a Buddhist for six years. I was drinking tea and doing Transcendental Meditation and Scientology and whatever else I could because I wasn’t entirely comfortable with myself. He was trying to kill me on a motorcycle and that kind of thing. It was quite self-destructive,” said the actor, who he began to drink a lot and to seclude himself in his house as a result of the death of his father, He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1982. By the mid-1980s, Swayze was able to embark on projects with more mature characters, such as the West Point cadet he played in the Civil War television miniseries North and south (1985). Or the handsome dance teacher, Johnny Castle, whom he played in the movie Dirty Dancing (1987). “Dirty Dancing was the perfect vehicle for Patrick, because the character of Johnny Castle bore a tremendous resemblance to Patrick Swayze in real life,” he opined. Wendy Leigh, author of Patrick Swayze: One Last Dance. “Johnny was masculine, noble, glamorous, but sensitive and sweet at the same time. And all of those characteristics he shares with the flesh-and-blood Patrick Swayze. Emily Ardolino, that ‘only’ cost four million euros, managed to collect more than 124 million at the box office, and Johnny Castle went on to become the icon of the sexy man. From that moment on, Swayze had to learn at a forced march how to handle fame and glory. But he did not feel comfortable being the object of permanent desire, nor becoming the obsession of all those crazy fans who were trying to rip his clothes as well as try to sneak into his hotel room. Totally overwhelmed by the situation, the American He took refuge in drink again, something that was about to destroy his relationship. Lisa herself would comment years later that her husband “had a different personality when he drank heavily. He was the best man on the planet, unless he had a drink.” After hitting rock bottom, and after seriously discussing the matter with his wife, who even left home for a while, Swayze managed to start to stop drinking and sought help, something that saved his marriage. That’s where they were when the actor received an offer to star in the tearjerker Ghost. Beyond love (1990). His role, that of a yuppie banker who, after being murdered, tries to communicate with his girl with the help of a seer, was first offered to the most important actors of the time, although all of them rejected it, considering it too corny. Swayze, who did accept the challenge, established himself as an international star thanks to that film. In 1991, People magazine took him to its cover, while crowning him as ‘the world’s sexiest man alive’. However, Swayze never wanted to be acclaimed for his physique but for his acting skills. The same ones that he notably showed in films like The City of Joy (1992), where he played a doctor on a spiritual journey. In June 1992, in an interview with Playboy, Swayze decided to speak openly about his past dalliances with drugs and his drinking problems. Several months later, desperate to find a solution to his lack of self-esteem, he spent a month in an Arizona rehabilitation center. “I may seem a little retarded,” he would say. “My nickname was ‘Crazy Swayze’, and that led me to feel a certain contradiction. I felt like a hypocrite and a liar because I said I felt one way but then I felt that way too. I think that feeling is what led me to start asking myself ‘who am I really?’” Tragedy knocked on Swayze’s doors again in December 1994, when his sister Vickie Lynn, who had been dealing with depression for some time, committed suicide at the age of 45. That death tormented Swayze for a long time, who would use his work in A Wong Foo. Thanks for everything, Julie Newmar (1995), a road movie in which she played a drag queen, as a tool to avoid being typecast and, incidentally, as therapy to overcome that personal misfortune.
Skinny cows and the worst possible news
For a moment, it looked like Swayze had been given a one-eyed look. Rolling Letters from a Murderer (1998), The actor suffered a serious accident while riding a horse (the animal went crazy and crashed into an oak tree in its gallop), and both legs were broken. A couple of years later, the plane in which he was traveling from Los Angeles to New Mexico had to make an emergency landing after hitting a lamppost. Swayze, who was uninjured this time, later explained that he was forced to land by a fault in the aircraft’s pressurization system. But some witnesses claimed to have seen a half-empty bottle of wine and several cans of beer in the cabin. Although Swayze was not charged for the accident, this affair took a toll on his reputation. In fact, some casting directors and studios thought that they could no longer trust the actor to be responsible when it came to shooting or being available, and his professional career was damaged. Seeing the percale, the one from Texas decided to produce together with his woman the feature film One Last Dance (2003), where both appear playing former dance students, which came out directly on DVD. In March 2006, the actor traveled to Austria to start shooting Death and Punishment (2007), a controversial drama where he played a Jewish lawyer who fights against Nazi followers. When his career began to languish, he was offered to get into the skin of the eccentric undercover FBI agent starring in a new series for the network A&E titled The Beast. Shortly after filming began, Swayze began to suffer from a lot of indigestion, losing weight and feeling quite weak. In January 2008, after suffering from jaundice, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and in March his illness was made public. Seeking some peace and quiet, the actor and his wife retired for a few weeks to the ranch they owned in the San Gabriel mountains. After beginning treatment, Swayze returned to Chicago to continue filming the series. His biographer says that, despite the severe pain he suffered, the actor refused to take medication because he felt that doing so diminished his acting skills. He also insisted on finishing shooting the 13 episodes that made up the first season of The Beast, that did not get to renew for the second season. “How do you keep a good attitude when all the statistics say you’re dead? You go to work,” Swayze explained to the New York Times. In January 2009, coinciding with the premiere of the series, the actor headed to Los Angeles with the intention of promoting it. However, he did not get to attend the event because, on his way, He began to suffer from an incessant cough that would take him to the hospital, where he remained for a week due to pneumonia. That spring, his doctors discovered that his cancer had spread. Swayze decided to burn the last cartridge trying an experimental treatment at Stanford Medical Center. But that did not work and, on September 14, at the age of 57, the actor stopped breathing, joining the list of official erotic myths.
