Getty Jennifer Grey and Derek Hough
“Dancing With the Stars” winner and actress Jennifer Grey opened up about one experience that changed her life forever ahead of the release of her memoir, “Out of the Corner.”
Grey won season 11 of “Dancing With the Stars.” She was paired with professional dancer and now six-time champion Derek Hough.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the 62-year-old spoke about being in a fatal car crash alongside actor Matthew Broderick, who she was dating at the time. The crash took place just weeks before “Dirty Dancing” was released in 1987.
Broderick was driving, according to ET. The crash was fatal for two women.
Grey Says The Crash Was Traumatic
In the interview, the actress said the car crash was very traumatic to live through.
“The car accident in Ireland, I would say, top three traumas of my life, maybe top one,” she told ET. “It’s very hard to describe when you have a near-death experience and are present for the death of other people.”
She added, “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.”
Grey said she was the only witness to the crash since she was the only one conscious afterward. She also said that Broderick had amnesia following the crash.
“I thought he was dead,” she told the outlet. “I didn’t even know there were two other women who were tragically killed at the time. It’s just something that you just don’t come back from in the same way.”
She told ET that she still thinks about it.
Grey Compared Her Nose Job to ‘The Twilight Zone’
In another part of her book, Grey opened up about a noes job that she got, and she compared the fallout to “The Twilight Zone” during an interview with People TV.
Grey shared that there was a lot of backlash after her nose job.
“It was freakin’ bizarre. It was like an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ and I was inside it and I couldn’t get out for decades,” said Grey. She also said that she didn’t even want to get the nose job in the first place, though she was having trouble getting work and felt she needed to.
She added, “The reductive nature of people’s judgment or whatever they’re projecting onto me of their own insecurity or that they related to me as a girl with an imperfect nose or a Jewish nose or not totally pretty enough to be a movie star, that I would dare to do that would make them feel like I was doing something to them — I don’t know what the psychology of it was, but it was relentless and I was traumatized by it.”
The star said that she was no longer going to defend herself or explain her decisions to people who hate on her.
“I finally got to really say, ‘I’m done. I’m done trying to define myself, to explain myself, defend myself. I’m just gonna give up’ and people can think whatever they want anyway because they’re going to,” she shared.
“Dancing With the Stars” will return in the fall of 2022 in a new home. The show will now air live exclusively on Disney+ instead of on ABC.
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