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1. Who plays Baby?
Jennifer Grey
She was in her mid-twenties playing a seventeen-year-old, and had just worked with her co-star on Red Dawn, where the two did not get along, which made the early rehearsals tense. The year before, she had played Ferris Bueller's sister Jeanie.
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2. Who plays Johnny Castle?
Patrick Swayze
Swayze trained as a ballet dancer, starting at his mother's studio in Houston, before a knee injury pushed him toward acting, so Johnny's moves are his own. He also co-wrote and sang She's Like the Wind, which is on the soundtrack.
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3. What is Baby's real first name?
Frances
Frances, as she tells Johnny, is after the first woman in the cabinet, Frances Perkins. The writer Eleanor Bergstein was called Baby as a girl herself, and built the story out of her own Catskills summers and her father's job as a doctor.
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4. What is the resort called?
Kellerman's
Kellerman's stands in for the big Catskills resorts like Grossinger's, which is why that one is the tempting answer. The film was actually shot at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia and around Lake Lure in North Carolina, and both still trade on it.
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5. In what year is the story set?
1963
Baby's opening narration places it in the summer before Kennedy was shot and before the Beatles came, a last season for the old resort world. The oldies on the soundtrack fit the period, while the big new songs are pure 1987.
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6. What does Baby carry into the staff party?
A watermelon
She tags along with Billy, Johnny's cousin, who is carrying watermelons up to the staff quarters, where everyone is grinding to the Contours' Do You Love Me. 'I carried a watermelon' is the first thing she manages to say to Johnny.
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7. What is Johnny's job at the resort?
Dance instructor
Johnny teaches the guests the fox trot and the mambo by day, and Max Kellerman's staff speech draws the line: the Ivy League waiters are told to romance the guests' daughters, the entertainment staff to keep their hands off. The whole plot sits on that divide.
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8. Who is Johnny's usual dance partner?
Penny
Penny Johnson is his dance partner and oldest friend, not his girlfriend. Cynthia Rhodes, who plays her, had danced in Flashdance and Staying Alive, and it is Penny's absence from the Sheldrake show that puts Baby in the act.
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9. Who got Penny pregnant?
Robbie Gould
Robbie is a Yale medical student waiting tables, who refuses to help pay for the abortion and lends Baby The Fountainhead instead, telling her that some people count and some do not. He is also seeing Baby's sister Lisa.
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10. What is Baby's father's profession?
Doctor
Jake Houseman is a physician, and Baby drags him to the staff quarters in the night to save Penny after a botched illegal abortion. He assumes Johnny is responsible, and only learns the truth at the very end, which is when he apologizes.
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11. Who plays Baby's father?
Jerry Orbach
Orbach was a Broadway star, the original El Gallo in The Fantasticks and the first Billy Flynn in Chicago, long before Law and Order made him Lennie Briscoe. He gets the film's apology: 'When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong.'
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12. Where do Baby and Johnny practice the lift away from the resort?
In a lake
The lake is the one place to practice the lift where a fall does not hurt, though Baby keeps clinging to his neck anyway. It was shot in autumn in a cold North Carolina lake, which is why the two of them look so chilled.
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13. Which song accompanies the final dance?
I've Had the Time of My Life
The song was written for the film by Franke Previte, John DeNicola and Donald Markowitz, and won the Oscar for Best Original Song along with a Golden Globe and a Grammy. Hungry Eyes, another Previte song, plays over the training montage.
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14. Who performs the duet on that final song?
Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes
Medley was half of the Righteous Brothers, and Warnes had already won an Oscar for the duet Up Where We Belong with Joe Cocker, which is what makes Cocker the tempting wrong answer. Lisa Niemi was Swayze's wife, but neither of them sings on the record.
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15. Who directed Dirty Dancing?
Emile Ardolino
Ardolino came from dance, with an Oscar for the documentary He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', and insisted on actors who could really dance rather than doubles. He went on to make Three Men and a Little Lady and Sister Act.
