One last dance with Patrick Swayze

"Before he was an actor, Patrick Swayze was a ballet dancer. He began at his mother's dance school in Texas, and went on to study at the Joffrey and Harkness ballet schools in New York before performing with the Eliot Feld ballet. He turned to acting because of an old knee injury (from football), but his first film role, in Skatetown USA (1979), was nevertheless a dancing one: gang leader Ace Johnson, king of the roller disco.

In his breakthrough film, Dirty Dancing (1987), he also played a dancer: rough diamond Johnny Castle, a dance teacher at a middle-American holiday camp, in a story about sex – a teenage girl's first experience – and, powerfully, about romance. It was his most iconic role and most successful film, with an enduring cross-generational appeal to its largely female fan base.

Swayze's dance training was central to his heart-throb appeal. In Dirty Dancing, dance is clearly used as a metaphor for sex: young Frances "Baby" Houseman (Jennifer Grey) learns how to dance with Johnny, and as they come together as a dancing couple, they become a sexual one too. For that to work at all it's not enough that Swayze looks really buff (OK, it's a big factor): he has to establish a physical rapport on the dance floor, otherwise we won't believe it's there in the bedroom. Dance training is vital for that. Compare Swayze's slow-burn smoulder with, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger's graceless fumblings in True Lies. Arnie is going through the motions and so his partner has to do the same; Swayze and Grey are coming together.

That's a potent, romantic fantasy, and again I think Swayze's dance background is pivotal, because he has learned how to partner. The male-female duet is a cornerstone of ballet. The man attends to the woman, supports her, facilitates her, lifts her, frames her. Something similar happens in ballroom and Latin dancing, although the nuances are different. Traditionally the man leads and the woman follows, but control isn't the objective: as with a ballet pas de deux, he is the ground against which she shines.

Look at Swayze in Dirty Dancing, and you can see that attentiveness, that focus: his "hungry eyes" fixed on hers, his concentration on her performance. It's both powerfully romantic and deeply sexy, and Swayze clinches it not because of his acting but because he learned dance partnering.

Swayze played the romantic lead in his other best-remembered movie, Ghost (1990), which also has a devoted female fanbase. This isn't a dance film, but its iconic sexy scene (the one with the wet clay) is certainly a musical number. And again I'd say that Swayze brings into play his dance-partnering sensibilities to portray a man so focused on his partner that he remains attentive even after his own death."