Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey says seeing her botched nose job was like ‘a bad hallucinogenic trip’
She said that after the procedure, ‘in the world’s eyes, I was no longer me’
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Jennifer Grey, the star of the 1987 classic Dirty Dancing, has written about her botched nose job in her new memoir.
In the book, Out of the Corner: A Memoir, she revealed that she got a nose job because – even after the success of the film – “there didn’t seem to be a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me” and she wanted to be cast as “something other than a Jew”.
The surgeon told her he would build her a “tip” as well as reconstructing the interior of her nose, and that he was “surprised” she could “breathe at all” with a “septum so severely deviated”.
Grey said it seemed at first as if the nose job had gone well, and she “finally made real money for the very first time in my life… working nonstop”.
But then one day on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Wind, John Toll, the cinematographer, walked over to her and said: “There is this little white – I don’t know, it looks like a bump, on the end of your nose. What is that?”
She explained: “There was this tiny corner of cartilage close to the surface protruding from the tip of my nose.”
The surgeon told her he would just need to smooth it down but, after the procedure was finished, Grey didn’t recognise herself.
“The way the nose was orientated on my face was all wrong,” she wrote. “Twin unfamiliar holes staring back at me. Are those my nostrils? This nose looked truncated. Something about the proportion was off. The placement. It was like I was on mushrooms, having a bad hallucinogenic trip.”
She said that after that, she was ignored by photographers on the red carpet and Michael Douglas failed to recognise her at a movie premiere.
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Her father told her: “I think it would probably be best if you just didn’t go out in public for a while.”
She wrote: “In the world’s eyes, I was no longer me.”
For the rest of the Wind shoot, Grey was filmed “through mirrors, from a distance“. She said: “When the movie came out, in the press Carroll Ballard declared my botched nose job the reason for the movie’s commercial and critical failure.”
In a recent interview, Grey said her nose job made her “lose her identity and career” overnight.
Out of the Corner: A Memoir is out on Tuesday 3 May.
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