Jennifer Grey

Jennifer Grey (born March 26, 1960) is an American actress.

Jennifer Grey was born on March 26, 1960, in New York City, the daughter of stage and Academy Award-winning screen actor Joel Grey and former actress/singer Jo Wilder (née Brower).

Her paternal grandfather was comedian and musician Mickey Katz.

Grey's parents both came from Jewish families.

Grey attended the Dalton School, a private school in Manhattan where she studied dance and acting, and where she met her best friend, actress Tracy Pollan.

After graduating in 1978, Grey enrolled at Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre for two years of training as an actress.

While waiting for roles, she supported herself waitressing.

She made her acting debut with the film Reckless (1984), and had her breakthrough with the teen comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986).

Her other feature films include Red Dawn (1984), The Cotton Club (1984), Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), Bounce (2000), Redbelt (2008), The Wind Rises (2013), In Your Eyes (2014), Duck Duck Goose (2018), and Bittersweet Symphony (2019).

Grey's commercial debut was at the age of 19, in an ad for Dr Pepper, before making her film debut in Reckless (1984), in a small role.

She appeared in a small role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984).

That year she starred in the war film Red Dawn.

She then appeared in the 1985 John Badham project American Flyers.

In 1986 she played the role of jealous sister Jeannie Bueller in the John Hughes comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, opposite Matthew Broderick.

The film was commercially successful and received a positive critical reception.

The following year, she reunited with Patrick Swayze, her co-star in Red Dawn, to play Frances "Baby" Houseman in Dirty Dancing.

The story is a coming of age love story: spending the summer at a Catskills resort with her family, Frances "Baby" Houseman falls in love with the resort's dance instructor, Johnny Castle.

The low-budget film was a surprise hit, was the first film to sell one million copies on video, and is considered a classic.

Paid $50,000 for her role, the film came to define Grey's career, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress for the role.

She subsequently earned worldwide fame for starring as Frances "Baby" Houseman in the romantic drama film Dirty Dancing (1987), which earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination.

Grey's early television work includes the made-for-TV films Murder in Mississippi (1990), Criminal Justice (1990), and If the Shoe Fits as Kelly Carter / Prudence (1990).

After consulting her mother and three plastic surgeons in the early 1990s, she underwent two rhinoplasty procedures.

The second was necessary to correct an irregularity caused by the first operation and ended up more extensive than what Grey had expected.

This resulted in a nose that caused even close friends to fail to recognize her, and the major change in her appearance affected her career.

Of the experience, she said, "I went in the operating room a celebrity—and came out anonymous. It was like being in a witness protection program or being invisible."

Grey's sole Broadway theatre credit is her 1993 appearance in The Twilight of the Golds.

Despite the success of Dirty Dancing, Grey felt that her looks would place restrictions on the type of future roles she would be considered for.

She starred as herself in the series It's Like, You Know... (1999–2001), won season eleven of the dancing competition series Dancing with the Stars (2010) and starred as Judy Meyers in the Amazon Prime Video comedy Red Oaks (2014–2017).

From March 1999 until January 2000, Grey starred as herself in the short-lived ABC sitcom It's Like, You Know..., which satirized her much-publicized nose job as a running gag.

Grey appeared with Shirley MacLaine, Liza Minnelli, and Kathy Bates in the CBS television movie The West Side Waltz, adapted by Ernest Thompson from his play.

She appeared in one episode of Friends as Mindy, a high school friend of Jennifer Aniston's character Rachel.

She had a small role in the 2000 film Bounce with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck.

In 2007, Grey portrayed Daphne on the HBO series John from Cincinnati.

In 2010, she played Abbey, the mother of a sick child in the season seven House episode "Unplanned Parenthood".

Grey was a contestant on season eleven of Dancing With the Stars.

She was partnered with professional dancer Derek Hough.

She came out very strong at first, frequently topping the leaderboard.

She has done voice work in film and television, providing her voice in the 2018 film Duck Duck Goose and the 2008–2014 animated television series Phineas and Ferb.

Grey recalled in a 2020 interview that an airline employee who checked her identity refused to believe that she and the actress the employee knew from Dirty Dancing were one and the same.

Grey briefly considered changing her name in order to start her career anew, but ultimately decided against this.