Getty Jennifer Grey
With the release of her memoir, “Out of the Corner,” actress Jennifer Grey is peeling back the curtain on many aspects of her life, including her infamous rhinoplasty that left her virtually unrecognizable and, as she writes in the memoir, killed her career overnight.
In an interview with People TV, the “Dancing With the Stars” season 11 champion likened the fallout from her two surgeries to an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Grey Said Living Through The Backlash Was ‘Bizarre’ & ‘Relentless’
In her interview with People TV, Grey said that it was only fitting that the prologue of her memoir be about her rhinoplasty because nothing could even come close to what a watershed moment that was.
“I knew I wanted to start off the book with something scary or dark and slingshot back to [the nose job], ‘Let me just tell you, this is how I got here,'” said Grey, but her editor told her to start with the rhinoplasty. “And I thought, ‘How did I ever think of doing anything else first?’ because I’ve had a lot of very dramatic things happen in my life, so I was picking through them. But nothing could’ve touched this one.”
Grey went on to say that she never even wanted to get a nose job, but she was having trouble getting work, so she had the procedure — and she was not prepared for the backlash, which followed her for years and years.
“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, adding that she thinks a lot of people were projecting a lot of things onto her.
“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,” said Grey.
She said that she decided she couldn’t spend the rest of her life “trying to convince strangers” who she really is, even as they accuse her “of being someone who’s addicted to the knife or self-sabotaging.”
“I actually never wanted the nose job in the first place and that really offended me, that they projected on
me that I didn’t like how I looked. I loved how I looked,” said Grey, adding, “It made me feel like, ‘Dude, there’s nothing wrong with how I am’ except I couldn’t get a job. I’d become famous and then I couldn’t get a job.”
Grey is ‘Done’ Trying to Explain Herself
But now, at 62, Grey said that she is done trying to please everyone else and done explaining herself.
“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,” said Grey.
She also said that she finally feels really good being in her own skin, though even that is something she works on daily.
“Dropping into this moment, I’m awesome. I just am. I’m awesome — not because I’m superhuman or perfect because I’m none of those things. I just have come to understand that who I am, not who you think I am, not what they say about me, just who I am, I have no question about it, so I feel pretty good in this skin. And that’s not to say that that doesn’t change as often as the weather … it’s a daily practice,” said the actress.
“Dancing With the Stars” returns for season 31 in the fall of 2022 on Disney Plus.
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