Jennifer Grey joined Dancing with the Stars for her daughter, but she revealed that the show actually saved her life.
Jennifer was one of the best-known dancers in movies of her era thanks to her role as Baby in Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze.
However, Jennifer hadn’t danced in 20 years because of an accident she was in with her ex-boyfriend Matthew Broderick. This accident left two people dead and Jennifer severely injured.
“It’s very hard to describe when you have a near-death experience and are present for the death of other people,” Jennifer told Entertainment Tonight. “Being alone on a country road in the middle of nowhere with nobody else around or conscious was pretty terrifying … It led to so many other things in my life.”
It also forced Jennifer to undergo a physical before she could appear on Dancing with the Stars 20 years later.
Jennifer Grey on how DWTS saved her life
When Jennifer went to the doctor for a physical, he revealed to her two things.
He looked at her spine and said she was lucky she was not paralyzed. He said her head was hanging off her spine, and that was why she had chronic pain for 20 years since the accident.
The second thing was that she had cancer and she had it for over four years.
“The fact is this reality show saved my life,” Jennifer said.
“If I hadn’t had a bad accident and hurt my neck, then they wouldn’t have found the thyroid mass. So in a way, the accident that I thought was maybe one of the worst things that happened to me saved my life.”
This story was part of what Jennifer is revealing to people in her new book, Out of the Corner.
Jennifer talks the accident, her exes, and more
In her new book, Jennifer Grey leaves no stones unturned.
Examples of her stories include her accident with Matthew Broderick, her relationship with Johnny Depp, and her plastic surgery.
“I wasn’t holding any information that people seem to think I did because they wanted an answer and there was no answer because it was an accident,” Jennifer said about the accident. “And [Broderick] was a great driver, and nobody was drinking. It was just an accident. And it was tragic, and I think about the family in Ireland all the time.”
As for Johnny, she wrote, “He’d started missing his flights home to LA having overslept or when he did come home, he’d be crazy jealous and paranoid about what I’d been up to while he was gone.”
As for her plastic surgery, which was when she had the nose job that she said changed how she looked and almost ruined her career.
“And it became the thing, the idea of being completely invisible, from one day to the next. In the world’s eyes, I was no longer me,” she wrote. “Overnight, I lose my identity and my career.”
Dancing with the Stars is on hiatus. The dancing reality competition series will return in late 2022 to its new home on Disney+ streaming.