What happened to Jennifer Grey after Dirty Dancing?

Dirty Dancing primed Jennifer Grey to become a star but that didn't exactly happen after Patrick Swayze's Johnny Castle took her Frances "Baby" Houserman out of the corner.

Grey hasn't been seen on the silver screen as regularly as one might expect of a breakout star of the '80s, but there is a reason for this. The question around her whereabouts have been raised following her recent appearance at the BFI London Film Festival at the premiere of her new film A Real Pain, where she also shared a hotly-anticipated update on a sequel to her 1987 classic.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ on the red carpet, Grey said of the follow-up: "I can't tell you much about Dirty Dancing as I'm not going to make promises. I'm just waiting for them to really nail it down as it has to be right. We can push that aside until we next time we speak when it hopefully will all be ironed out."

Her reemergence in the public eye has led to questions around what the actor has been up to since she had the time of her life, so to speak, all those years ago.

With Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Dirty Dancing under her belt, odds were that Grey would continue her upward trajectory but that sadly didn't come to pass, and for reasons largely out of the actor's control.

Firstly, Grey had a nose job at her mother's suggestion shortly after Dirty Dancing's release, and a second one in the early nineties. The plastic surgery was one that the actor came to describe as her biggest regret because it led to an identity crisis, particularly when people stopped recognising her including her co-star Michael Douglas.

Speaking to People in 2022 about the exchange with Douglas, Grey said: "That was the first time I had gone out in public. And it became the thing, the idea of being completely invisible, from one day to the next. In the world’s eyes, I was no longer me."

Her career was marred by the events of her personal life, with her plastic surgery leading her to become the butt of jokes rather than a box office draw for casting agents like her mother had thought.

Read more:

• Jennifer Grey says Patrick Swayze apologised to her for his on-set behaviour

• Kieran Culkin is 'clearly awards-bound' after career-best role in A Real Pain

• Patrick Swayze's widow reflects on 'Ghost' 30 years on: 'He had to fight for that role'

Grey also wrote about the experience in her memoir Out of the Corner remarking that "overnight [she lost her] identity and my career" and felt she "spent so much energy trying to figure out what I did wrong, why I was banished from the kingdom. That’s a lie. I banished myself."

Another personal incident also impacted her career, a tragic car accident involving her then boyfriend Matthew Broderick which resulted in the deaths of two people. Grey was injured in the crash alongside the Ferris Bueller's Day Off actor, and the accident shook Grey so badly that she has since said it "changed [her] life forever".

Reports of tension between her and Swayze on the set of Dirty Dancing also had a lasting impact on her professional career, the pair famously didn't get on well on set which painted Grey in a bad light.

Speaking to People, Grey said of the matter: "We weren't a natural match. And the fact that we needed to be a natural match created a tension. Because normally when someone's not a natural, you… both people move on, but we were forced to be together. And our being forced to be together created a kind of a synergy, or like a friction."

The actor continued to work after Dirty Dancing but it wasn't nearly as big as what she did before, there were TV movies and cameos in shows like Friends, House, and Grey's Anatomy. The actor also turned to voice acting, appearing in shows like Phineas and Ferb and the English dub for The Wind Rises.

Her new film A Real Pain has already been a cause of celebration at the BFI London Film Festival. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the film follows cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji's (Kieran Culkin) who embark on a journey to their grandmother's family home in Poland after her death.

Grey portrays a tourist on the Holocaust tour that David and Benji go on to the ancestral home that was taken away when the Nazis invaded Poland. The film has been praised for its thought-provoking narrative and has even drawn early awards buzz for Culkin.

Perhaps it could prove the start of a new chapter for Grey, at least in the interim before the long-awaited Dirty Dancing sequel is ready to show to the world.