Patrick Swayze, the balletically athletic actor who rose to stardom in the films Dirty Dancing and Ghost and whose battle with pancreatic cancer drew wide attention, died Monday. He was 57. His publicist, said in Los Angeles that Swayze had died with family members at his side.

Swayze’s cancer was diagnosed in January 2008. Six months later he had outlived his prognosis and was filmed at an airport calling himself, “a miracle dude”.

He even went on to star in The Beast, a drama series. He filmed a complete season while undergoing treatment. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” he said. “You go to work.”

A week before the series began, Swayze appeared on the Barbara Walters Special on ABC. “I keep my heart and my soul and my spirit open to miracles,” he told Walters. But he said he was not going to pursue every experimental treatment. If he were to “spend so much time chasing staying alive,” he said, he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the time he had left. “I want to live,” he said.

Swayze received attention in several early movies and in the mini-series North and South, but Dirty Dancing (1987) established him as a leading man. He starred opposite Jennifer Grey as a young working-class dance instructor at a Catskills resort who had more heart, integrity and sex appeal than the wealthy guests with whom he was forbidden to fraternise.

He exhibited similar intensity in Ghost (1990), an enormous box-office hit. His character, a loft-living yuppie banker, is murdered early in the film and spends the rest of it as a spirit, trying to communicate with his fiancée (Demi Moore) with the help of a psychic (Whoopi Goldberg).

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