Patrick Swayze was in his mid-thirties when he became an overnight sensation for his performance in the dance and romance movie Dirty Dancing (1987). In it he played the dance instructor Johnny Castle, and Jennifer Grey was his pupil, Baby. The film cost $5 million and was intended primarily for video, but it grossed more than $200 million worldwide and was one of the biggest hits of the year.

Swayze came from a dance background himself, though by the time he made the film his dancing career was almost over. He was afflicted with an old injury and needed further surgery during shooting. His physical problems and advancing years had motivated him to attempt to expand himself as an actor, and he had already appeared as part of Francis Ford Coppola’s Brat Pack ensemble in The Outsiders (1983), along with Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise — though Swayze was rather elderly for the label brat.

On the back of Dirty Dancing he was not short of offers for other starring roles. He made a couple of films that suggested he might slip back into obscurity as quickly as he had emerged from it. Then came his second blockbuster hit, the weepie romantic drama Ghost (1990), which was an even bigger hit than Dirty Dancing. Swayze was briefly ranked among Hollywood’s most bankable stars and was acclaimed in People magazine in the US as the sexiest man in the world (ie, the US).

Ghost was a cinema landmark, regularly included in polls of the most romantic films ever. Swayze, the hunky Texan good ole boy, played a New York banker who is murdered and comes back as the ghost of the title. The scene in which his former lover, played by Demi Moore, feels his presence while making a clay pot, with Unchained Melody dipping and soaring on the soundtrack, was one of the most memorable (and, in time, mocked) cinema moments of the decade.

Swayze’s character in Ghost seemed to crystallise the contradictions in him between the American footballer and the ballet dancer, tough but sensitive, hellraiser and loyal mate, and commentators might argue that Swayze himself embodied the contradictions within modern American Man, torn between traditional macho values and his place in a new world and new gender politics.

Swayze struggled with celebrity and with alcoholism. He tried determinedly to move on from the image of beefcake in a vest, appearing in several “independent” movies and notably exploiting and undermining his good looks and healthy image as a charming self-help guru, with a hidden stash of child porn, in the cult classic Donnie Darko (2001).

There were well-publicised incidents to underline his personal difficulties and setbacks, including one bizarre escapade in which he landed, and parked, his light aircraft in a housing estate in Arizona, after it seemingly developed a fault. There were suggestions that he was drunk, but his erratic behaviour was attributed to the fearsome experience and the sudden descent.

He remained married to his Texan teenage sweetheart, Lisa Niemi, and they worked together and lived together on a spread called Rancho Bizarro, 30 miles outside Los Angeles, surrounded by horses, chickens and hi-tech recording equipment.

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born in Houston, Texas, in 1952, one of four children. His mother, Patsy Swayze, was a successful choreographer and ran a ballet school, and his brother Don would also become an actor. He studied ballet from an early age but also excelled at sports and went to San Jacinto College, Houston, on a sports scholarship.

He was an accomplished gymnast, diver, athlete and American footballer, though football was responsible for the lingering knee injury that cut short his dancing career.

One of his first professional dancing and acting jobs was as Prince Charming in a Disney parade, which toured North and Central America. He attended Harkness and Joffrey ballet schools in New York, was principal dancer with the Eliot Feld company and appeared on Broadway with Joel Grey (Jennifer’s father) in the musical Goodtime Charley in 1975. That same year he married Niemi, whom he met when she was a 15-year-old dance student at his mother’s school.

He joined the long-running Broadway production of Grease in the lead role of Danny Zuko and made his film debut in 1979 in the roller-disco movie Shakedown, USA. He played a soldier dying of leukaemia in an episode of M*A*S*H in 1981 and began appearing fairly regularly in films, including The Outsiders, Uncommon Valor (1983), Grandview, USA (1984), on which he was also choreographer, and the silly Red Dawn (1984), in which the Soviet Union invades America, but a group of small-town teenagers reckon they can take them on.