Dirty Dancing to Detroit

Swayze admits he's no different. 'I arrived here with three weeks to rehearse, which isn't long - I'd have hoped for four, but I thought I could do it in three - but then this damn infection almost brought me to my knees.' Is he going to be ready for the critics? He splutters into his drink. 'I guess that remains to be seen.'

There is an odd mixture of modesty and ego to the actor and dancer. In one breath he talks about team playing and loving the company ethic at the Piccadilly; in the next he laments the 'loneliness' of stardom and its lack of anonymity. 'Even now,' he says at one point, 'especially now, I know as long as I live, there'll be no place I can go [and not be recognised].'

Swayze has not made a mainstream movie for more than 10 years, yet his fan base, largely female, still crosses continents. The longevity of his sex appeal is remarkable. Fully grown women, remembering the poster on their bedroom wall as 15-year-olds, still swoon at his name.

At the height of his Hollywood fame - in the early 1990s, after Ghost and Dirty Dancing - he was regularly mobbed, particularly in Europe, by thousands of adoring women.

'Yeah, and they show Dirty Dancing to their daughters and they'll show it to theirs. I'm intrigued by how many generations are raised on that movie,' he says. 'To many women around the world, I guess that will be my legacy.'

But, boy, was he beautiful in those films. Swayze is now 53 and has lost the sculpted jaw and the piercing eyes. Today, still ill, he looks dry-skinned and exhausted. I wonder what it feels like, to have once been so defined by physical appearance and now to see it fade.

In no other profession are men so objectified: does he perhaps feel like a once-beautiful woman? 'Oh, that's so much harder for a woman,' he rasps. 'The standards she has to maintain as she gets older are just stupid.

'I spent so long being frustrated by how I looked. I seemed so boyish, I was a man trapped in a boy's body for so many years. Now I guess I'm finally looking like a man.'

Yet after Dirty Dancing - after the equally celebrated tongue-sandwich with Demi Moore in Ghost, and the laddish surfer movie Point Break with Keanu Reeves - Swayze seemed simply to disappear, resurfacing only occasionally in a series of comparatively small-budget indie films.

He played a drag queen in Beeban Kidron's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar; an American doctor in India in Roland Joffe's City of Joy; a TV evangelist and paedophile in 2001's Donnie Darko.

These roles may have earned him a new cult following, but above all they spoke of a career on the skids. Did he turn his back on Hollywood, or it on him?

Swayze maintains that it was his disillusion with the big studios that forced the break - though he was also at a particularly low point in his life.

'For a while, I got sucked into that whole blockbuster mentality, where you're just living for the box-office figures and selling your soul to a machine,' he says.

'I have a real passion [for acting] and a real sense of purpose and if I lose those things, something dies inside me. That's what started to happen. I had to decide what was really important. I had to forcibly expand my horizons. You know, I've never really taken a film for the money.'

Swayze was offered a reported £7 million for a cameo in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, 2004's sequel to the original - 'but I turned that down because I knew from the off it was a piece of crap'.

He was also drinking far too much, and checked himself into a rehab clinic before retreating to his beloved ranch in Texas.

'Am I a recovering alcoholic? Nah, I'm a recovering obsessive personality. When I get into something I'm very intense. I ping-pong between obsessions, but, thank goodness, I've always had an in-built self-preservation instinct. I'll experiment with the dark side now and then, just to see what it's like.'

So does he drink now? He has admitted in the past to resorting to alcohol 'on and off throughout my life', particularly when a situation seemed unfair, or cruel, or he lost someone.

'You can turn yourself into an alcoholic if you start buying into the "isn't life terrible routine". Nobody gives you a shoulder to cry on because you seem to have so much, like money and fame.'

Today he drinks 'here and there'. 'I'll have a glass of champagne, but I don't drink drink. I've been there, done that. A certain wisdom comes with age.'

The obsessive side comes from his mother, he says. He was raised in Houston, Texas, where Patsy Swayze was a ruthlessly demanding dance teacher and choreographer. From her, Patrick learned that classical dance was all about 'striving for perfection'.

'You get this very strong sense that nothing is ever good enough in that ballet world, that you should always be trying harder. I like that now because it means you're always pushing yourself further. But as a kid, it was tough.'

His dad, meanwhile, was a Texan engineer and cowboy. 'He was the loving one, he had that beautiful cowboy energy. But he was also a serious man. He used to say to me: "If you ever start a fight, I'll kick your butt, and if you don't finish one, I'll kick your butt."

'I live in the last part of the US where it's not all about lawyers. If you mess somebody over, they're not going to sue you, they're going to shoot you. I like those odds. Like my dad, I really do live a cowboy life.'

Swayze was devastated by the death of his father in 1982, but has also had to cope, sadly, with the suicide of his sister Vicky, a manic-depressive who overdosed on medication in 1994.

Her death inevitably 'changed my life', he says. 'The older you get, the more death you face. After my father died, my manager died and then my sister. Loss comes to everyone, but I started to feel I was cursed. I had to find something to believe in to beat the guilt and blame I felt, particularly in Vicky's case.'

He talks of the various faiths and spiritual beliefs he investigated to make sense of her loss, but it was life on the ranch that saw him through 'the darkness of that time'.

'Living close to nature, you're in touch with the life cycle and you realise, Jesus, everything you love dies. So how do you deal with that? The only way I've discovered is a native American Indian philosophy. You make a commitment to honour the spirit of the person, or animal, you've lost. You have to make them proud of you for as long as you live, which is what I try to do for my father and my sister.'

As often as he can, he takes off into the mountains of Texas on horseback, with his dogs and a packhorse, occasionally for several months at a time. 'Once the food runs out, you have to live off the land.'

Life on the ranch is perfect for children, he says, yet, despite trying, he and his wife of 31 years, Lisa Niemi, have never had a family. It is a great sadness to him. 'I think I was born to be a father,' he says. 'I've designed the perfect life for kids and I believe I could prepare a child well.'

He won't go into detail, but says he and Lisa, whom he met at his mother's dance academy, are currently considering adoption.

Meanwhile, he finds himself in the crowded, sweaty West End, about to star opposite Claire Sweeney, the former Brookside actress-turned-hoofer, who plays Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls.

Was he familiar with Sweeney's work before they met? Of course not, though he swerves the question deftly. 'All the people I've spoken to say, "Oh my word, she's a national treasure!" Claire is open to everything: let's try this, let's try that. I just know we're going to do something special.'

As I leave the Piccadilly, I pass a gaggle of middle-aged women pawing adoringly at Swayze's picture on the hoardings outside. For them, he'll always be Johnny Castle, working-class hero of that film, Dirty Dancing.

And I wouldn't blame him if he did have just a little stage fright: as his career ever since has proved, Johnny Castle is a very tough act to follow.