Patrick Swayze Nearly Passed on Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing was such a huge success that it solidified Patrick Swayze's Hollywood career and iconic status, even if he didn't go on to have even more success down the line. Swayze, though was doubtful about the script when he first read it. "It seemed fluffy — nothing more than a summer-camp movie," he said in his memoir, The Time of My Life.

The fact that Swayze's memoir is titled The Time of My Life should tell you just how much that movie meant to him, both personally and professionally. Of course, that is also the title track from the movie and one of the most well-known movie songs of all time.

Even though Swayze's original impression of Dirty Dancing wasn't entirely off base, the movie ended up with just enough edge and "adult content" to make it a hit with audiences of all ages. If you grew up in the 1980s, Dirty Dancing is likely among a small group of movies that you remember vividly, likely having seen it numerous times for various reasons over the years.

With the advent of High School Musical and numerous cable channels with round-the-clock singing and dancing, Dirty Dancing now seems very dated and lost in some sort of "almost-but-not-quite-a-musical" genre. But at the time, it was about as close to a musical as a major motion picture could get and it was a brilliant melding of the old and the new. Even though though the movie was made in the 1980s, it was set years earlier in the Catskills in New York.