Patrick Swayze Died

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Sep 15,2009

Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into moviegoers’ hearts with “Dirty Dancing” and then broke them with “Ghost,” died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

“Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” his publicist, Annett Wolf, said in a statement Monday evening. Swayze died in Los Angeles, Wolf said, but she declined to give further details.

Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer. He kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting “The Beast,” an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot.

Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making “The Beast” because they would have taken the edge off his performance. The show drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.

Swayze’s career waned in the late ’90s; for a long time, his most notable screen appearance was in the 2001 cult favorite Donnie Darko. In March 2008, he announced he had pancreatic cancer. Nonetheless, by July of that year, he was in sufficiently good health to begin working 12-hour days (while still undergoing chemotherapy) on a TV series, starring as a world-weary undercover FBI agent in the A&E crime drama The Beast, which premiered in January to 2.4 million viewers.

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