Patrick Swayze

Patrick Swayze trained as a dancer. He moved to New York in 1972, at twenty, to finish that training at the Harkness and Joffrey Ballet schools, which is not the usual route into American action cinema. The parts he got in the early eighties made almost no use of it: Darry Curtis in The Outsiders in 1983, then Jed Eckert in Red Dawn the following year. He was being cast for the physique rather than for anything the physique had been taught to do.

Dirty Dancing corrected that in 1987. It cost four and a half million dollars, took around 214 million worldwide, and became the first film to sell a million copies on video. Its song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Swayze got a Golden Globe nomination and, more usefully, a part that required the ballet training and the screen presence at the same time. Road House followed in 1989, a film of an entirely different order that has aged into its own kind of standing.

Ghost in 1990 was the highest-grossing film of the year, taking over 505 million dollars worldwide against a budget of around 22 million, and it brought a second Golden Globe nomination. Point Break arrived in 1991 with Keanu Reeves and a surfing bank-robber premise that had no business working. A third Globe nomination came for To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in 1995, in which he played a drag queen - not a turn anyone would have forecast from Red Dawn.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January 2008 and carried on working. The Beast, a series for A&E, premiered in January 2009, and a memoir written with his wife Lisa Niemi was published the same year. He died on 14 September 2009, aged fifty-seven. The then-and-now comparison does not exist for him in the way it does for others here, which is its own kind of information: there is no later photograph to set beside Dirty Dancing, only the short run of films that was the whole career.