EXCLUSIVE: From 'Dirty Dancing' to Career-Killing Nose Job — We Reveal What Happened to Jennifer Grey as She Makes Comeback in Oscar-Tipped Movie

Dirty Dancing actress Jennifer Grey was tipped to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood after shooting to fame in the smash hit movie...until she had a nose job.

But following her iconic role as Frances 'Baby' Houseman in the 1987 movie alongside Patrick Swayze, she foolishly took her mum's advice to have a rhinoplasty in the mistaken belief that she would become more conventional-looking and would find more leading roles, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

It backfired, however, and her career nosedived, but now she's back decades later in the Oscar-tipped movie A Real Pain and we chart her career from Dirty Dancing heartthrob to sitcom dud and her return to the top.

Grey, 64, is on record as calling the surgery the greatest mistake of her life.

"Overnight I lost my identity and my career," she said.

The actress had been tipped for greatness, given the enormous success that Dirty Dancing had enjoyed.

Yet a combination of the ill-fated nose job, her injuries from a car crash, and residual tensions with Swayze meant that the fame that she had was very much of the undesirable kind.

She became a butt of jokes on late-night chat shows, and when she tentatively restarted her acting career, one sitcom in which she appeared featured a discussion of her nose job as a running gag. She could have been forgiven for fleeing the industry and abandoning it all.

However, Grey has returned to prominence with a high-profile role in Jesse Eisenberg’s dark comedy, A Real Pain, in which she plays Marcia, part of a Holocaust tour group in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin characters are participating in.

A Real Pain has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim and is being tipped to figure heavily in the awards season later this year, with Grey a distinct possibility for a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Hollywood loves a comeback, as the recent Oscar for Brendan Fraser proved and Grey’s rollercoaster narrative will undoubtedly endear itself to voters. But what went so wrong in the first place?

Grey was born into show business. Her father Joel is an Oscar-winning actor best known for the role of the diabolical MC in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and her mother Jo was an actress and singer.

Her early trajectory was unexceptional, if privileged; private school in New York, then acting training, when she supported herself working as a waitress. The first role that she had of any significance was in the war drama Red Dawn in 1984, after a bit part in Francis Ford Coppola’s jazz crime picture The Cotton Club, and she appeared opposite her future Dirty Dancing co-star Swayze.

However, she came to greater public attention with her sparky and dynamic performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which she played Jeanie Bueller, Ferris’s cynical older sister, and the only member of his family who can see through his schemes and ploys.

Grey, who began what she later called "a clandestine set romance" with her co-star Matthew Broderick, was one of the stand-out features of a widely acclaimed film.

Filming Dirty Dancing may have been a dissatisfying experience, but it was, predictably, an enormous success when it was released in August 1987, eventually going on to earn $214 million at the global box office.

Grey was unable to enjoy the fruits of its acclaim because, a couple of weeks before it came out, she was involved in a car crash in Ireland with Broderick. The pair had chosen to keep their relationship secret, but it was revealed publicly in the most disastrous of fashions after the actor, who was driving a rented BMW, was involved in a head-on collision with a mother and daughter, who were killed instantly.

Grey suffered whiplash, and Broderick was convicted of careless driving and fined.

She said: "It’s very hard to describe when you have a near-death experience and are present for the death of other people. 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."

Then came the nose job and she suggested that her reason for having it was that she felt ugly and conspicuous; despite her presence in a box office smash, "there was not a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me".

As one plastic surgeon publicly mused why she hadn’t had a nose job, she decided, egged on by her mother, that it was the only viable option.

As she later wrote: "My so-called 'problem' wasn’t really a problem for me, but since it seemed to be a problem for other people, and it didn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, by default it became my problem. It was as plain as the nose on my face."

But Grey was rendered virtually unrecognizable, after her nose had been, in her description, "truncated” and “dwarfed".

Photographers failed to recognize her on the red carpet, and her fellow actors did not remember who she was, either.

Overnight, she became first a joke, then a cautionary tale.

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