(Credits: Far Out / Alan Light)
Wed 7 January 2026 3:00, UK
Fame is fleeting, but if you manage to helm a transcendent cultural touchstone like The Sound of Music or Titanic, you’re guaranteed a prominent place in history, and while there aren’t many actors who get to be the face of timelessly iconic movies, Patrick Swayze, who died at the age of 57, managed to star in not just one but several of these timeless classics.
Take Dirty Dancing, the 1987 dance-heavy romance, which might not have thrilled critics at the time, but it’s a quintessential piece of ‘80s nostalgia. Three years later, he did it again with Ghost, a mid-budget tearjerker about a ghost, a medium, and a ceramicist that defied all logic to become the third highest-grossing movie of all time. In fact, you can probably add The Outsiders, Road House, and Donnie Darko to the list, all of which have become classics for one reason or another.
In other words, Mr Swayze should have had nothing to regret about his career. However, where most actors would give their right arm to star in just one of the movies that he did, even if it meant that it was the last starring role they got, for the Dirty Dancing star, there was one missed opportunity that he never got over. Early in his career, a role came up that was so precisely within his wheelhouse that no amount of future success could make him stop regretting its loss.
The film was 1980’s Urban Cowboy (not to be confused with John Schlesinger’s 1969 film Midnight Cowboy about a young male hustler trying to make it in the big city) involving the story of a Texas boy living in Houston who loved dancing, and for Swayze, who was born and bred in Houston and had begun classical ballet from a young age, it was a role that seemed tailor-made for him.
Unfortunately, he was stuck in Los Angeles making Skatetown, USA, an acutely of-its-time musical about roller disco, while the Urban Cowboy role went to John Travolta, who had recently dominated the box office with Grease.
There were several reasons why not getting the part was so galling for Swayze, even beyond the biographical similarities between himself and the main character. For one thing, he had just finished playing Danny Zucko in the Broadway version of Grease, adding yet another parallel between his and Travolta’s careers, but the primary difference was that the latter got the movie role for Grease over him, and losing the Urban Cowboy role was adding insult to injury.
More importantly, though, was the fact that his mother, Patsy Swayze, was the choreographer on the film and had hired Swayze’s partner, Lisa Niemi, to work with her. So young Patrick was stuck in LA working on a film he didn’t much care for while his mother and future wife were making a movie that he believed was practically written for him. Ouch!
“It tore me up to think of what I could have done with that character and how it would have launched my career,” Swayze recalled, adding, “Country dancing was in my DNA, and as much as I liked John, I hated giving someone else tips on how to play a role I was born for.”
He couldn’t be mad for long, though, for as soon as Skatetown wrapped, he high-tailed it to Houston and struggled to maintain any animosity towards his rival as soon as they met, even helping Travolta learn a few moves.
Related Topics