Watch clips from Dirty Dancing I Ghost I Point Break

The news that Patrick Swayze, 55, is suffering from pancreatic cancer is terribly sad, not least to those of us who hold fast to our belief that Point Break, Ghost and Dirty Dancing, in which he starred, are among the greatest films ever made.

Desperate not to be typecast, Swayze has in his career played a transvestite and a paedophile, but it was in Point Break, playing a bank robber opposite Keanu Reeves in a fetching white T-shirt, and as the dance teacher Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, that a generation of girls will remember him. “You have to accept that to be the actor you want to be, you have to have the courage to turn down work,” Swayze has said. “I haven't worked hard all my life to be stuck in a box.”

He was born in Texas to an engineer father and a dance-teacher mother. It was at one of her classes that he met his wife of more than 30 years, Lisa Niemi. One of four children, he was relentlessly teased for studying ballet.

“See these knuckles?” he once said. “There's a reason they look like that. I got bashed from the day I was born. It was why I learnt martial arts.”

He began his career not in Jackie Chan style, but as Prince Charming in Disney on Parade. But his big break came in 1985, when he was cast in the American TV mini-series North and South. Dirty Dancing followed, then the role of Sam Wheat, opposite Demi Moore, in Ghost. He won Golden Globe nominations for both, and it's a hard heart that can watch the clay-moulding scene without sobbing. By 1991, he was being voted Sexiest Man Alive, shortly after which, in typical style, he took a role as a drag queen.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. The death of his father and, in 1994, the suicide of his sister drove him to drink and a spell in rehab. The loneliness of fame, he said, was messing with his head. “The moment you give in to indulgence, everything goes wrong. It could have got out of control - I could have been an alcoholic - but I have self-preservation in me.”

Just as well, given that he once only narrowly survived a bush fire, and on another occasion was temporarily paralysed from the waist down after being thrown from a horse. It took 12 operations and a truckload of titanium to rebuild him. “I am,” he joked, “the new $6 million man.”

Although reports vary as to the seriousness of his condition, he is believed to be undergoing chemotherapy in California, and to be touched by the international concern. “I have a great deal of faith in faith,” he told one interviewer. “I would like to believe ... that there's life after death because if there isn't, why are we here?” His fans around the world are hoping that it's not his time to find out.

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