LISSA’S: Catching up with the cast of Dirty Dancing.

Jennifer Grey
Playing Baby was great-but having a baby was better.

She and Swayze haven't stayed in touch But "I would be thrilled to see him". One thing she did hold onto: the famous pink dress. "I took it and have it in storage." she says.

"There's so much of my soul in the movie. I still dance all the time-I just don't do it for show. It was a perfect part of me", says Grey, who was 26 when she landed the lead role, Frances "Baby" Houseman.

"I had that kind of double life as a teenager, being a daddy's girl and a good girl, and then this rebellious, darker side ready to break out."

Break out she did, but her overnight success, combined with trauma from a serious car crash just days before the movie opened, left her too stunned to take advantage. "It was enough to mess with my whole experience with fame, " says Grey, 47. "I didn't properly take the wave I was on."

A year later, "I wasn't getting the offers I wanted," says Grey, daughter of Broadway's Joel Grey, so she opted for a nose job, thinking it would broaden her range as an actress.

"My idea was to look the same-just slightly different, a little better," she says. "But it was like a really bad dream. I went from being completely recognizable by everyone to not at all by anyone."

Making light of her situation, Grey played a woman whose nose job makes her unrecognizable in the '99 sitcom It's Like, You Know …"But by then", she says, "I wanted to take a break."

In '01 she married actor Clark Gregg (The New Adventures of Old Christine) and later had daughter Stella, now 5. She recently went back to work, starring in the upcoming HBO series John From Cincinnati, "but raising Stella is by far the most rewarding thing I've ever done" she says.


Patrick Swayze
Still dancing and still making the ladies swoon.

"Dirty Dancing taught me how to do a love scene. It's about connecting on a soul level".

Casting Dirty Dancing rebel Johnny Castle was easy. "There was only Patrick", says screenwriter and co-producer Eleanor Bergstein. "Nobody else was really in contention." Playing the swirl-hipped dance instructor was harder.

"It was working through puiled muscles until 4 o'clock in the morning." recalls Swayze, who had studied with the Joffrey Ballet before getting his big break in 1983's The Outsiders. Still, Swayze knew he was part of something special. "It was goose bumps", he says. "Energy that something electric and wonderful might happen."

It did. Dirty Dancing just blew the lid off my career. " says Swayze, 54. He followed up with another romantic lead, in 1990's Ghost, with Demi Moore. But stardom took its toll. In 1993, he checked into rehab. "I played with trying to deal with frame and got stupid and drank too much" he says. "I feel real fortunate that I've come out on the other end of it all". He put his life back together by stepping away from Hollywood and running a 20,000 acre-New Mexico ranch with Lisa Niemi, his wife and dance partner of 31 years. "I get on a horse and disappear in the mountains with my dogs" he says. Not that Swayze is done performing. He starred in last year's London production of Guys and Dolls and is now shooting Christmas in Wonderland in Canada. As for his fan base? I've still got 18 year-old girls hugging me" says Swayze. "And I constantly have some old lady pinching me on the rear. I turn around and see blue hair running back to a group of other blue hairs going, "I did it, Martha! I pinched him!"


Lonny Price
Who played Neil Kellerman

Then: "I remember how embracing Patrick Swayze was to everyone," says Price, 48, who played Neil Kellerman, the camp owner's son who has his sights set on Baby. "And I remember the mud-days of trudging in mud to shoot I've Had The Time of My Life over and over."

Now: He's single, dating, and directing the new Broadway musical 110 in the Shade.


Cynthia Rhodes

After playing Penny, the dancer who gets pregnant, Rhodes, now 50, married to musician Richard Marx and moved to the Chicago suburbs to raise three sons. Says Eleanor Bergstein: "She loves being a mom."


Wayne Knight

Best known as Newman on Seinfeld, Knight, 51, played Stan, the camp activities director. "I didn't know much, not having been to resorts" says Knight, who was supposed to have just one scene. But they liked me! It was a lot of fun.


Kelly Bishop
The Mom

Then: Originally cast to play Vivian (the married older woman who hits on Swayze's Johnny Castle). Bishop, 63, arrived onset only to discover they wanted her to play Mary, the mom. "Jerry Orbach whispered in my ear, 'Take it, it's better', recalls Bishop. "So I did it. He took me under his wing". When I wasn't learning the meringue, we played Scrabble" she says. "Scrabble was a rough game with Jerry, he knew all the two-letter words".

Now: For the past seven years Bishop has played Emily, the grandmother on the WB's Gilmore Girls. "I was just hooked into the show" she says. Since then the series has been canceled. "I've got to get back onstage" says Bishop, who lives in New Jersey with her husband, TV personality Lee Leonard, and was in the original 1975 Broadway cast of A Chorus Line. "I love theater it's my home".