Patrick Swayze “danced into hearts, then broke them,” said Andrew Dansby in the San Francisco Chronicle. The “hunky actor” died Monday of pancreatic cancer, at age 57. From his first lead role, in Red Dawn (1984), through his “first role as an icon,” in Dirty Dancing (1987), to his biggest hit, the “prototypical date-flick romance” Ghost (1990), Swayze was “among the biggest movie stars in the world” (watch Swayze’s dance finale in Dirty Dancing and pottery scene in Ghost).
Still, he “just never fit the Hollywood hunk mold,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. He had the looks, the “body and grace of a panther,” and the “chiseled” cheeks and abs, but the Houston native also had a “decency and dignity”—“no strange eccentricities, no sex tapes to be leaked”—that didn’t fit Hollywood’s tabloid culture. Until his January 2008 cancer diagnosis, tabloids “had no taste for him”—then, shamefully, they wouldn’t leave him alone.
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