Whatever Happened To The Girl From Dirty Dancing?

Even if you remember that Grey played Matthew Broderick's sister in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, you may not remember that she was also in a relationship with Broderick. Even more under the radar, then, is the fact that Grey and Broderick were in a serious car accident just before Dirty Dancing was released. While on vacation in Ireland, the pair were in a rented car when Broderick (who was driving) collided head on with another driver, killing two people. 

While Grey only suffered bumps and bruises externally, the accident left her with emotional scars. "I became America's sweetheart within five days of the accident," she told People in 2010. "The juxtaposition of that deep sorrow, the survivor's guilt ... and then being celebrated as the new big thing just didn't jibe. It didn't feel good to be the toast of the town." 

So Grey didn't relish her newfound fame like she likely would have otherwise, choosing instead to take a bit of a step back. "The impact was emotional and physical," she said in the People interview. "My body was never the same, my head was never the same, my ambition was never the same."

After her relationship with Matthew Broderick, Grey was linked to another Hollywood actor. After A Nightmare on Elm Street, but before Cry Baby and Edward Scissorhands, none other than Johnny Depp wooed Grey. While they were only together for a year, and famously only appeared in a single photograph together, the two were actually engaged during their short romance. Given the current state of Depp's personal and financial life, we'd say the actress probably dodged a bullet. (Add that to things we never thought we'd say a couple of years ago.)

While Grey might not have thrived as a Hollywood starlet, that didn't mean she had to give up acting. So she turned to TV movies. In 1990 she was in Murder in Mississippi, which recounted the murder of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. In the film she played the wife of Mickey Schwerner, one of the murdered activists. 

The same year she starred in Criminal Justice and If the Shoe Fits, where she played an attorney, and Rob Lowe's dressing room assistant in a modern retelling of Cinderella, respectively. In 1991's Eyes of a Witness she played a doctor in Kenya whose father is suspected of murder and in 1993 she once again played an attorney in A Case for Murder. If you don't remember any of them, don't worry — neither does anyone else.

Around this time in the early '90s, the recognizable face of Baby Houseman faded forever into distant memories and VHS replays when a piece of cartilage broke off from the first surgery and she underwent a second nose job. While the first may have drastically altered her appearance, the second made her virtually unrecognizable. According to the NY Daily News, while she was sedated, the doctor "decided to turn a minor change into a major change." While her career seemed to be on a downswing already, Grey went from still being a known name (and face), to what she called "complete obscurity."

As her parts got smaller and smaller, Grey started to realize just how much of an impact her drastically different appearance was having on her success. No longer did "Jennifer Grey" mean the same thing it meant in 1987 when she was coming off the high of Dirty Dancing. In fact, it was around this time that Grey considered changing her name altogether. 

According to Newsweek, after the nose job incident Grey invented the monicker and personality Wanda West, reportedly named after Grey's old street (Wanda) in Hollywood. The idea, as Grey told Newsweek, was that Wanda West could potentially get more roles than Grey herself was getting at the time. "I've got to tell you, I think it could have worked," she said. "This town is so built on who's the new face, and no one would have ever known it was me." Ultimately she decided to stick with who she really was, telling Newsweek, "I guess it's a lost opportunity now — I'm stuck with me."

While her Hollywood relationships may have been fodder for tabloids and her ill-fated sitcom, Grey finally found true love in 2001 when she married Clark Gregg — who you may know from The New Adventures of Old Christine or, more recently, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D — on Martha's Vineyard. The couple had only dated for about a year prior and were wed by Gregg's father Robert, an Episcopal minister. The couple's daughter Stella was born five months later and, as Grey told People, "it was very hard to get me out of the house because I didn't want to miss any of it. It was all about family, friends."

While Grey had continued to work in the years since her 1987 car accident, there were lingering injuries that only continued to worsen. In an interview with People, Grey described "headaches that lasted four days" due to the degenerated ligaments that had ripped in the accident. While Grey tried to get along with just Advil and ice packs, she was approached multiple times to do Dancing with the Stars. Although she had said no more than once, she finally agreed at the encouragement of friends Michael J. Fox and Jamie Lee Curtis. To do that, she needed a physical. 

The doctors discovered she had a compressed spinal cord, which meant that all it would take to lead to paralysis was "one slip, one fall, one minor rear-end." Grey's doctor ordered two spinal surgeries. During these surgeries, her doctor became worried about a lump she had previously been told was a benign thyroid nodule. Turns out, it was full-blown thyroid cancer. This led to two more surgeries to have her thyroid removed entirely. 

Luckily, Grey did not require chemotherapy or radiation and after those four surgeries she has a titanium plate in her neck and is cancer-free. With a relative clean bill of health, she decided it was time to finally tackle DWTS. Grey told Good Morning America, "I do feel that just the movement towards the joy, in spite of the fear, was a very important shift for me."

Beginning in 2014, Grey found her way back to television by way of Amazon's Red Oaks. Set in the 1980s, Grey plays the mother of university student David who just got a job as a tennis coach at the Red Oaks Country Club and is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Grey's character Judy is trying to figure things out herself, most notably, her sexual identity. 

In a panel ahead of the second season (via After Ellen), Grey explained her character's struggle of "not knowing if it's just this marriage that she wasn't into, or maybe it's not maybe it's not men, or maybe it's just a different man, or maybe it's a woman. And because it's [the 1980s], not now, and because she came from a time when it wasn't okay to be gay, and it's just like it's just so new, the idea of what that is, that's nothing she has ever explored."

With the critically panned Dirty Dancing remake still fresh in a lot of people's minds, you may be wondering why Grey wasn't a part of it. It turns out she was asked, and she turned down a role. "I was asked to do something on that show and I was flattered because I always want to be asked because it's nice to want to be included. But for me, it would be sacrosanct for me to do it because it didn't feel appropriate to me," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "It feels like if you're going to do your own thing, do your own thing. I wouldn't say [what role was offered] but I will tell you, it wasn't Baby!" Grey said before the remake was aired that she was excited to watch it and that she was "flattered and excited for people who are excited enough to put their stamp on it and see what they make of it and how they make it their own." 

Unfortunately, it just didn't work for viewers. The Atlantic called it a "sad, strange production" while Entertainment Weekly said the remake itself "belongs in a corner." Ouch. Looks like it probably would have been a lot better if Grey had stepped on board.