Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey is opening up about the nose job she says cost her a career in Hollywood. In an interview with the New York Times to promote her forthcoming memoir Out of the Corner, Grey describes the impact of plastic surgery on her life: “Overnight I lose my identity and my career.”
The two surgeries, which Grey refers to as “schnozzageddon,” took place after Grey starred as Baby Houseman opposite Patrick Swayze in the 1986 smash hit Dirty Dancing. “After Dirty Dancing, I was America’s sweetheart, which you would think would be the key to unlocking all my hopes and dreams,” Grey writes in her memoir. “But it didn’t go down that way.” Grey recalls that after Dirty Dancing, there were still not “a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me.” Industry professionals apparently told her that her nose was “a problem,” with one plastic surgeon wondering “why that girl didn’t do her nose” after watching the film.
“My so-called ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem for me, but since it seemed to be a problem for other people, and it didn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, by default it became my problem,” she writes. “It was as plain as the nose on my face.”
After consulting her mother and three plastic surgeons, Grey underwent two rhinoplasty surgeries to“fine-tune” her nose. The second surgery, meant to correct an irregularity caused by the first, was more aggressive than Grey had hoped, and left her nose “truncated” and “dwarfed”—rendering Grey practically unrecognizable to people she had known for years.
Grey painfully recalls being hounded by the paparazzi and becoming a national punchline due to her plastic surgeries. “Being misunderstood on a global stage was very painful,” Grey told the Times.
Her memoir also details a tragic incident in which Grey and her former boyfriend and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off co-star Matthew Broderick were in a car accident in Ireland that left two people dead. Grey, who was in the passenger seat while Broderick drove, required spinal surgery as a result of the head-on collision thirty years after the fact.
“We were so young,” Grey told the Times. “And there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about it. That I don’t think about the families. That I don’t think about Matthew. It’s just in me. It’s part of my topographical map, the landscape of my life.”
Now, at 62 and recently divorced from Clark Gregg, her partner of 19 years, Grey is ready to embark on the next chapter of her life. “The truth is,” she told the Times, “when I had all the good stuff, I was definitely not even close to how free I feel today.”
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