Patrick Swayze: the image of dignity, decency and defiance

Though it was not his first film or even his breakthrough -- he'd already had that three years earlier with "Dirty Dancing" -- my favorite memory of Patrick Swayze came in 1990 with the romantic thriller "Ghost" with Demi Moore: He played a man whose love was so strong that, despite being gunned down in the street, he refused to leave this life until he knew she was safe.

Like countless other women around the country, I suddenly wanted to buy a potter's wheel, slip into a guy's oversized white shirt and work with clay, the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" playing in the background.

As he was in "Ghost," Swayze tended to be cast as the noble sort, the decent one, whether as the leader of a band of Colorado teenagers fighting evil forces in 1984's "Red Dawn," or the post-apocalyptic warrior of 1987's "Steel Dawn." Even when society had labeled him a bad guy, when anger and outrage came it was because someone else had stepped over a line and it was up to him to make things right, as he did as a bouncer-drifter in the gritty 1989 flick "Road House."

It was that decency and dignity, along with that defiance, that he would bring to his final challenge as he fought the pancreatic cancer that would fell him at 57, too soon. Rising above the denial and diffusion that characterizes so much of Hollywood, Swayze told Guy Adams in Britain's Independent in January after he'd gone through a difficult round of chemotherapy, "Yeah, I'm angry; yeah, I'm scared," as if to say otherwise would be insane.

Whatever the role, Swayze brought to it the body and grace of a panther, an effortless sense of movement that took Baby's breath away in "Dirty Dancing," giving Jennifer's Grey's character the courage and support she needed to find herself. He seemed content to stay in the background, amused by the irony of the affluent at play in that '60s Catskills summer. The lifts and spins when they danced were stunning, but there was a modesty Swayze brought to the character, as if he understood that he was just a part-time player in Baby's drama, a soon-to-be afterthought.

You felt that generosity of spirit was really Swayze, and by all accounts it was. It was there again and again on screen as he seemed forever to be stepping back to let someone else dominate the spotlight. And because of that quality, you couldn't help but notice him, the quiet intensity, the goodness, pulling the eye back in his direction.