MCT:

Patrick Swayze, the two-fisted Texan who danced like a god, died Monday in Los Angeles after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

It's hard not to think that the one-time gymnast, who vaulted to stardom in 1987's Dirty Dancing, had rehearsed his premature exit in the 1990 blockbuster Ghost.

As the banker who solves his own murder mystery, he speaks from the dead to his living sweetheart, Demi Moore. Swayze, impossibly sexy and throbbingly sensitive, tells her: "It's amazing, the love inside. You take it with you."

That's a reassuring thought for Lisa Niemi, Swayze's wife of 34 years, and for his many fans who greeted the actor's March 2008 announcement that he had Stage IV pancreatic cancer with prayers and prayer circles.

There are great actors and there are great screen personalities. Swayze was the latter. His reputation rests on Dirty Dancing and Ghost, and what made them beloved was his gallantry. Quite simply, he radiated Galahad-like honour. "Patrick possessed a depth of nobility," said his Point Break director Kathryn Bigelow.

Even while undergoing chemotherapy, Swayze put in long hours on the cable television drama The Beast on A&E. When well-wishers enquired how he nurtured such a positive attitude, despite a prognosis that claims 75 per cent of patients within a year, the consummate professional crisply replied, "When the statistics say you're a dead man? You go to work."

Kept on ticking

To quote the phrase made famous by his distant relative, Timex pitchman John Cameron Swayze, throughout a lifetime of physical challenges, the actor 'took a licking and kept on ticking'.

He often delivered dialogue guru-style, and with his passing, some of his oracular lines seem eerily prescient. Swayze's family and fans (who is not?) might find comfort in remembering Point Break, in which he says, "It's not tragic to die doing what you love." Or, The Outsiders, where as the big brother counselling his baby brother, he says, "Just because you lose somebody, you don't stop living."

Besides his wife Lisa, Swayze is survived by his mother, Patsy, and siblings Don, Sean and Bambi.