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Jennifer Gray rose to fame after starring in 1987’s ‘Dirty Dancing’ alongside Patrick Swayze – but was shunned by Hollywood after two nose jobs.
The actress has starred in her upcoming memoir, Out of the Corner, out May 3.
“I put so much energy into trying to figure out what I did wrong, why I was banned from the kingdom,” the actress told People magazine on Monday. “That’s a lie. I banished myself.”
Gray said it was her mother, actress Jo Wilder, who suggested she get a nose job at a very young age. Her father is Oscar winner Joel Grey, best known for Cabaret.
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Jennifer Gray spoke about cosmetic surgery in Hollywood. (Getty Images)
“She loves me, has loved me, always loved me, and she was pragmatic because she said, ‘You know what? It’s too hard to cast you. “And then I did it and she was right. It wasn’t like ‘You’re not pretty.’ It’s like, ‘You know what? If you don’t want to be an actor, OK. But if you want to be an actor…’”
Gray admitted that as an adult she was “completely against rhinoplasty.” However, the star noted how Hollywood’s beauty standards may have led the matriarch to believe the procedure would only boost her career.
“I thought it was great that my parents did it [underwent rhinoplasty]. I get it, it was the ’50s,” Gray said. “I understand that they assimilated. I understood you had to change your name and you had to do certain things and it just got normalized right? You can’t be gay. You can’t be a Jew. You know, you can’t look Jewish. You’re just trying to fit into whatever [it] thinks the group.”
Gray finally gave in. But it was the second procedure that significantly changed her appearance. She described how Michael Douglas, after going under the knife, didn’t recognize her at a premiere.
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Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray in a scene from the movie Dirty Dancing, 1987. (Vestron/Getty Images)
“It was my first time going public,” she explained. “And it became the thing, the idea of being totally invisible from one day to the next. In the eyes of the world, I wasn’t me anymore. And the weird thing was the thing I’ve resisted my whole life and the thing I was was so mad at my mom for always telling me to blow my nose. I really thought it was surrender. I really thought it meant surrendering to the enemy camp. I just thought, “I’m good enough. I shouldn’t have to do that.’ I really felt that. ‘I’m beautiful enough.'”
Gray said she’s never felt so comfortable in her own skin today. She is currently hard at work on a sequel to Dirty Dancing. Swayze died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 57.
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Jennifer Gray said she’s now more comfortable than ever in her own skin. (Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)
“I just want to feel who I am now,” she told the outlet. “But I think when you ask other people who you are and you ask people to love you and you take their opinion as the definition of your worth, it’s a slippery slope, man.”
And she insisted nobody put baby in a corner.
“It’s a new feeling,” Gray said. “Getting myself out of the corner – and realizing that I got myself there through stories, through narratives that didn’t give me the best life. The story I told myself about how I got here wasn’t a great story. And not entirely true. I hadn’t seen how I made decisions.