R.I.P. Patrick Swayze: Obits From Around the Web

Patrick Swayze, 57, passed away this evening after a two-year long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Swayze’s first major role was in 1983′s “The Outsiders,” and he recently starred in the 2009 television series, “The Beast.” But he is probably best known for his turn as Johnny Castle in 1987′s “Dirty Dancing.” A trained Broadway dancer with an impressive physique, he had golden locks and the acting chops to match. Twenty-two years later, and at the end of a celebrated career, it’s the “Dirty Dancing” poster that remains. Pinned up on bedroom walls and college dorms around the world, Mr. Swayze lives on.

Here are the best obituaries we’ve read, as the press pays tribute:

The Los Angeles Times

Patrick Swayze, the actor and classically trained dancer whose role in the enduringly popular “Dirty Dancing” made him a movie star, one who struggled with the alienation of fame and against being typecast as a leading man… (Read more here)

The New York Times

Mr. Swayze said more than once that he was determined not to be typecast. In a 1989 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, he said, “The only plan I have is that every time people think they have me pegged, I’m going to come out of left field and do something unexpected.” (Read more here)

The Washington Post

Rita Kempley, a former Washington Post film critic, once described Mr. Swayze’s appeal as “a cross of Brando and Balanchine. From the neck up, he looks like a guy who could fix your carburetor; from the neck down he has the body of an Olympian.”  (View slideshow and read more here)

The Associated Press

C. Thomas Howell, who costarred with Swayze in “The Outsiders,” “Grandview U.S.A.” and “Red Dawn,” said: “I have always had a special place in my heart for Patrick. While I was fortunate enough to work with him in three films, it was our passion for horses that forged a friendship between us that I treasure to this day. Not only did we lose a fine actor today, I lost my older `Outsiders’ brother.”                (Read more here)

Entertainment Weekly

Whoopi Goldberg (co-starred in Ghost): “Patrick was a really good man, a funny man and one to whom I owe much that I can’t ever repay. I believe in Ghost’s message, so he’ll always be near.” (Read more here)

The Guardian

It wasn’t until his scene-stealing turn in Richard Kelly’s cult-classic psychological nightmare Donnie Darko (2001), playing the sinister motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, that Swayze’s career found a new act. His looks were now those of a character actor, and a new generation of moviegoers responded to his muscular presence, and direct address to the camera. (Read more here)

The Times

Ghost was a cinema landmark, regularly included in polls of the most romantic films ever. Swayze, the hunky Texan good ole boy, played a New York banker who is murdered and comes back as the ghost of the title. The scene in which his former lover, played by Demi Moore, feels his presence while making a clay pot, with Unchained Melody dipping and soaring on the soundtrack, was one of the most memorable (and, in time, mocked) cinema moments of the decade.                        (Read more here)

The Telegraph

“You can bet that I’m going through hell,” Swayze told Barbara Walters in January. ”I’m at the beginning of my battle. And I expect it to be a long hard battle, one that I’m gonna win according to certain rules – and the rules that the cancer isn’t going away,” he added. (Read more here)