Lover, fighter, fantasy figure: was Patrick Swayze the perfect movie star? 

It’s one of many stories told on a brand new documentary, I Am Patrick Swayze, which premiered in the US on what would have been the actor's 67th birthday (August 18). Charting his life and career through interviews with friends, family, and co-stars, archive footage, and home videos, the film also marks a decade since Swayze's death from pancreatic cancer in September 2009, and 30 years since his late 1980s/early 1990s prime as a leading man.

In a Hollywood era defined by cheese-drizzled manliness, when the up-and-coming generation of male stars were marketed as heartthrobs as much as they were actors, Swayze was almost tailor made for success: a gyrating vision of intensity and charisma, seemingly chiseled from a hunk of pure, uncut machismo; purveyor of “the lift” and cinema’s swishiest ever hair – sweeping between pompadour and mullet, but always unmistakably Swayze-like.

But Swayze’s prime was relatively short, with just a handful of big movies: Dirty Dancing, Roadhouse, Ghost, and Point Break. Swayze never reached the Cruise-like mega-star status that he seemed to be hip-swiveling his way towards in the 1980s.

Yet it’s near impossible to not have a crush on Patrick Swayze. I’ve long been suspicious of anyone – man or woman – who doesn’t have at least a smidgen of romantic affection for him. 

Born in 1952, Patrick Swayze – “Buddy” to his friends and family – was raised in Houston, Texas. As remembered in the I Am Patrick Swayze doc, his father Jesse Wayne was a charming man’s man – known as “Big Buddy” to Patrick’s “Little Buddy” – and his mother Patsy a respected dance teacher. In the documentary she’s described as “taskmaster”, and, as revealed by Lisa Niemi, Swayze’s wife of 34 years, Patsy chose her son’s name because she thought “Patrick Swayze” would look good on a marquee. She was right; her son was destined for fame, but as the cost of a harsh, sometimes abusive, upbringing.

“She was really tough and really an example of what happens in families in a cycle of abuse,” says Niemi about Swayze’s mother. “She could be very violent, but it was nothing compared to what she endured growing up and the stories I heard about what she went through with her mother.”

With his mother’s reputation as a tough dance teacher, Swayze’s brother Don looks at her methods as a means to “spur him on”. 

“It was important for Patrick to be great,” says actor C. Thomas Howell, also speaking on the documentary. “I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just the way he was raised. His mother wouldn’t accept mediocrity in the studio.”

Swayze played football until he suffered a devastating injury that broke his knee inwards. But he became a professional dancer, moving to New York and performing in the Eliot Feld Ballet Company and shows such as Grease. He did some of his best ever dancing work on a severely damaged knee – requiring another four reconstruction surgeries. He had to give up dancing and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. 

Looking back at his dancing from New York, Lisa Niemi recalls, “I thought to myself, ‘There’s nothing more beautiful than seeing a masculine man move with such grace. Buddy had that and like nobody else did.” That was arguably the appeal of his biggest roles. He was a slick, physically indomitable alpha – whether it was hot-stepping in Dirty Dancing, karate kicking baddies in Road House, whacking a hockey puck in Youngblood, extreme sporting in Point Break, or sledgehammering down walls and bare-chested pottery fondling in Ghost. 

Swayze first found his macho groove as the big brother to a gang of “greasers” in Coppola’s The Outsiders. Adapted from the classic S.E. Hinton novel, it starred a now eye-watering line-up of brat-packers in-the-making: Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Tom Cruise. According to Lowe, Swayze was the alpha both on and off screen. “He just wanted to be the biggest bad-ass on the set, that was his thing,” says Lowe on the documentary. “I so admire that. Today they call it ‘big d––k energy’.”

Swayze fought off communists in Red Dawn and starred alongside his wife Lisa in post-World War III actioner Steel Dawn, which stands somewhere between Mad Max and Waterworld in the wasteland of apocalyptic cinema. 

Undoubtedly, Swayze’s most iconic role was in 1987’s Dirty Dancing as Johnny Castle, a holiday camp dancer who teaches Baby (Jennifer Grey) how to salsa, become a woman, and – of course – have the time of her life. Famously, he didn’t get along with dancing partner Jennifer Grey at first, a tension that boiled over from their time together on Red Dawn but which made for a sizzling on-screen romance between Johnny and Baby. 

Like Dirty Dancing itself, Johnny Castle is dressed up like the early Sixties but is pure Eighties at heart, all deliciously corny dialogue (“Nobody puts Baby in the corner”) and sweat-drenched hunkery. But there’s also a wounded sensuality to him, as much a staple of Swayze’s persona as the physicality.

Dirty Dancing was a cinema hit and home media phenomenon, with its big-selling VHS and soundtrack, which included Swayze’s own ballad-turned-Magic FM late night banger She’s Like The Wind. For anyone who grew up in that era, Dirty Dancing is remembered for being replayed endlessly by a generation of girls, as Swayze’s moves and Baby’s sexual awakening both thrust into their adolescent fantasies.

But Johnny Castle is as much a masculine fantasy, with his impeccable t-shirts (seriously, no one in cinema history has worn a plain t-shirt quite like Patrick Swayze), unchained sex appeal, and his mastering of “the lift”. For further proof, see how Ryan Gosling’s womaniser from Crazy, Stupid, Love appropriated the move as his number one pulling technique.

Swayze showed more enviable machismo in 1989’s Road house, a film that – as much fun as it is – was little more an excuse for two hours of bare boobs and punch-ups. Swayze plays the ludicrously-named Dalton, a nails-hard bouncer brought in to clean up a small town drinking den, but who ends up turning vigilante and also cleaning up the town of its resident villains.

But as detailed in the documentary, Road House almost stopped Swayze from landing the lead role in 1990’s Ghost. After seeing the ultraviolent Road House, Ghost director Jerry Zucker said there was no way he’d cast Swayze. But Swayze won Zucker over and went on to play Sam Wheat, a banker and boyfriend to Molly (Demi Moore). After he’s murdered by his sleazy best pal Carl (Tony Goldwyn) for a dodgy bank deal, Sam – now doomed to spend eternity in the same burgundy v-neck – has to save Molly and leave the mortal plane behind.

In terms of a dramatic performance, it’s Swayze’s finest moment. His bantering with Whoopi Goldberg’s reluctant psychic is a delight (“Why don’t you find a house to haunt? Get some chains and rattle ‘em!”) and his chemistry with Demi Moore is believably emotional and intense. If you’re not teary eyed when the Heaven-bound Sam says his final goodbye – “I love you, Molly,” “Ditto,” – your soul deserves to be dragged off with Carl to the screeching blackness of Hell. 

As Keanu Reeves would surely agree, Swayze cemented his status as one of cinema’s ultimate man-crushes on 1991’s Point Break, the white-knuckle bro-fest directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Swayze plays adrenaline junkie Bodhi, whose gang of surfers-turned-bank robbers “The Ex Presidents” is infiltrated by Keanu’s undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah.

Utterly ludicrous but played entirely straight, Point Break is packed with quotable lines (“Back off Warchild, seriously”), high-octane action (I reiterate: jumping out of a plane without a parachute), and enough rampant testosterone to power Dwayne Johnson for a year.

It’s arguably the most homo-erotically charged action film ever made, which puts it up against some rather stiff competition. Even the bromance of the Fast & Furious can’t compete. Indeed, the original Fast & Furious was little more than a cut-and-shut knock-off of Point Break, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker recreating the manhood-measuring love-in of Swayze and Keanu. 

But it was Ghost, with its cheesy dramatics and Oscar success (Best Supporting Actress for Whoopi Goldberg and Best Original Screenplay for Bruce Joel Rubin) that should have punched Swayze’s ticket to permanent spot on the A-list, like Rain Man did for Tom Cruise and Philadelphia for Tom Hanks. But Swayze was conflicted: he wanted to be taken seriously as an actor while the industry wanted him to be a movie star. 

He opted to make the 1992 film City of Joy, directed by Roland Joffé, a ponderous drama set in the slums of Calcutta. Swayze referred to it as his attempt at “life after sex symbol” but it didn’t connect with audiences. He made another bold choice with 1995’s drag queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, but from that point Swayze’s film career consisted of mostly low-budget, low-level drama or action, veering ever closer to TV movie level, including a cameo in the regrettable sequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.

The one standout moment from his later years was in Donnie Darko, playing motivational speaker Jim Cunningham (later outed as a paedophile thanks to Donnie). It was an inspired piece of casting: the kind of self-aware, playing-against-type reinvention that has given other stars a career comeback, like Matthew McConaughey’s “McConnaissance”, which began with Killer Joe, and John Travolta following Pulp Fiction.

It’s perhaps fitting that Swayze didn’t fall into the role of movie star as the industry had expected of him. Every bit the physical, macho persona that he put on screen, Swayze was a keen outdoorsman and chose to live on a ranch away from Hollywood – first on the outskirts of Los Angeles and later by the New Mexico mountains. He kept horses as a tribute to his father, who had died of a heart attack aged just 57. 

Lisa Niemi recalls in the documentary how Swayze would disappear into the mountains to clear his head. He also battled alcoholism. “I have these demons that run around in my insides,” Swayze said in an interview. “I’ve done everything in the world thinking one day I’m going to get rid of them and someday I’m going to have happy, and the shortness of breath will go away. I don’t know if it ever will. I’ve given up on happy.”

Swayze revealed that he had cancer in 2008, and filmed his final project, the well-received crime TV series The Beast, while undergoing treatment. Though he publically spoke about fighting the cancer, and battled on beyond his original prognosis, Swayze died on September 14, 2009. 

It’s not hard to see why, all these years later, the affection for Patrick Swayze has transcended his relatively few hit films. He was a man who women swooned over and other men wanted to be, but whose intensity than ran deeper than raw physicality. What else can you say about Patrick Swayze but, “Ditto”?