American actor Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on 18th August 1952 in Houston, Texas and passed away on 14th September 2009. He was married with no children. Apart from acting, he was also a singer and dancer.
As a child and during his teens, Patrick learnt ice skating, classical ballet, theatrical acting and martial arts, as well as played football. At age 19, he decided to travel to New York to continue perfecting his dancing techniques.
In 1979, he made his first movie appearance. During the 80s, he took part in a TV commercial, performed in a stage production, starred in an episode of the series ‘M*A*S*H* and was one of the protagonists of the series ‘The Renegades’. He then starred in several popular films like ‘The Outsiders’, ‘Red Dawn’ and ‘Youngblood’, but real success arrived in 1986 with the miniseries ‘North and South’.
In 1987, Patrick starred alongside actress Jennifer Grey in the movie ‘Dirty Dancing’, where he showed his abilities as a professional dancer as well as composed and sang the song ‘She’s like the Wind’ for this film. This was a low-budget movie and was not expected to be successful. Surprisingly, however, it was of great success worldwide, as was Patrick’s song which placed with the Top 10 hits on the music charts.
Patrick became a superstar and started receiving several movie roles. In 1990, the famous iconic film ‘Ghost’ was released, wherein Patrick starred alongside Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. A year later, he acted in yet another big movie, ‘Point Break’.
During the shooting of ‘Letters from a Killer’ in 1997, Patrick was seriously injured, causing filming to stop for 2 months. Due to his injuries, Patrick was forced to take a break from acting until the year 2000.
In the 9 years that followed, Patrick took part in 13 movies and 5 TV series and during his career, he received 6 awards.
In January 2008, Patrick was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and after a 20-month battle, died at the age of 57.