Nobody puts Jennifer Grey in the corner.
The “Dirty Dancing” star looked back at her relationship with Matthew Broderick before she was cast in the 1987 film and revealed her former beau didn’t exactly have faith in her.
Grey, 62, wrote in her new memoir, “Out of the Corner,” that her then-boyfriend said he didn’t think she would get the coveted part of Frances “Baby” Houseman on the night before her audition in 1986.
“He said this odd thing, as if to reassure himself, like he wasn’t aware he was using his ‘out loud voice,'” Grey wrote, recalling him saying: “‘I don’t know what I’m worried about. There’s no way you’re gonna get it. I’m sure they’re seeing everybody for this part.'”
Grey also wrote that her “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” costar didn’t want to hang out with her at a nightclub the day before her audition. But she explained that she begged and pleaded with him to come out with her to the club, which played ’50s and ’60s music, and he reluctantly agreed.
Broderick and Grey began a “clandestine set romance” and had a “secret rendezvous” in 1985 while they were shooting the John Hughes teen comedy in which they played warring siblings.
Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey catch a performance of the Broadway play “Burn This” in Nov. 1987.Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images“I was as surprised as anyone when our relationship morphed from on-screen sibling rivalry to off-screen illicit romance,” she wrote in her memoir, noting he was in a relationship with someone else at the time.
Once “Ferris Bueller” wrapped filming, Grey noted that she wanted to end their secret romance.
“I realized I was in love with Matthew and told him I couldn’t see him anymore,” she said. However, instead of ending their affair, the “Producers” star “promptly broke up with his ‘close family friend’ and we were together.”
The ex-couple was engaged in 1988 for a brief period, but their relationship was revealed in August 1987 when they were both involved in a tragic car crash in Northern Ireland that killed two people.
Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images“Matthew just felt like my guy [and] he felt like home,” the “Red Dawn” star added, but she also described how he would have frequent mood swings. “He was a 24-year-old who could easily slip into the persona of a cranky old guy when it suited him,” she wrote.
Elsewhere in her book, she confessed that her breakup with Broderick inspired Madonna’s hit 1989 song, “Express Yourself.”
Madonna, 63, threw Grey a 29th birthday bash in March 1989 and she wrote that the “Vogue” crooner told her at the bash that her relationship influenced the catchy girl-power song.
“She played it for me in her car. I was in my log cabin with Johnny [Depp] and she said, ‘Come into my car,” Grey said. “And I got in her Mercedes where she had a really good sound system and she was like, ‘Listen to this song I just did. It’s about you.'”
