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
1987 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.” She was apparently told her that
her nose was “a problem,” with one plastic surgeon wondering after watching
the film why she hadn’t had a nose job.
“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. A second surgery was meant to correct an
irregularity caused by the first, but left her nose “truncated” and
“dwarfed”—rendering Grey practically unrecognizable to people she had known
for years.
Grey painfully recalls no longer being recognized by
photographers and becoming a national punch line 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 costar
Matthew Broderick were in a car accident in Ireland that left two people
dead. Grey, who was a passenger in the car while Broderick drove, required
spinal surgery as a result of the head-on collision 30 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.”
