Jennifer Grey

The actress who became America's sweetheart in “Dirty Dancing” explores how her looks -- and her alteration of them -- affected her career.

Grey’s memoir is interesting not only for her journey out of darkness but also for what her story reveals about what women encounter in the entertainment business, and the fortitude required to make it. At 41, she gave birth to a daughter, and at 50 she won season 11 of “Dancing With the Stars,” despite rupturing her lumbar disc near the end. Nothing, however, comes close to the torment of what she dubs “Schnozzageddon.” The irony of it: “I’d taken a certain pride in being an original, not looking like every other actress.” So had her fans. Grey doesn’t come right out and connect the dots like this, but you can’t come away from her book without being aghast at how Hollywood operates. (The marriage lasted 20 stable years.) She discovered happiness and meaning in later adulthood, not as an actor, but as a mother — and a dancer. Grey rose to fame in her mid-20s with a pair of films that became touchstones of the 1980s. But barely out of her 20s, she had no work, no backup plan. She got sober, and found an acting coach and a husband. “Out of the Corner” is meant to be a tale of triumph, and it is, once Grey climbs out of career-crash hell. Grey chronicles the flatlining of her career with savage and engaging wit. That’s when her father originated the role of the slick, menacing Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret” onstage, in 1966. Swayze’s character, Johnny, famously proclaimed in “Dirty Dancing” that “nobody puts Baby in a corner,” but that’s where Grey ended up in real life.