Cynthia Rhodes
Four films, three of them about dancing, and then she stopped. Cynthia Rhodes was a dancer before she was an actress, and the early 1980s had a brief, intense appetite for performers who could genuinely move: she is Tina Tech in Flashdance and Jackie in Staying Alive, both released in 1983, before playing Officer Karen Thompson in the 1984 thriller Runaway, a part with no choreography in it whatsoever.
Then came Penny Johnson in Dirty Dancing, which is why anyone still writes about her. Penny is the professional in a film about an amateur, and the role requires Rhodes to be technically superior to the leads while remaining emotionally subordinate to them. That is a difficult combination and she makes it look like nothing. Every dance in that film is measured against hers, including the famous one.
She has also appeared in music videos, sung in a band and written songs, and she retired from acting rather than drifting out of it, which is rarer and more deliberate than it sounds. Four credits is a very small body of work. One of them is durable enough that the size of the rest has never mattered.
Movies (4)
Where to start with Cynthia Rhodes
Dirty Dancing is not a controversial recommendation and there is no point pretending otherwise. Watch it for Penny in particular: the difference between an actor performing choreography and a dancer living inside it is legible in every frame she occupies, and it is why the dancing in that film has aged so much better than the clothes.
Flashdance makes the ideal follow-up because it works the opposite way round, a film about dance in which the dancing is largely assembled in the edit, and Rhodes is one of the few people on screen doing it for real. Staying Alive is a curiosity, a sequel with none of the grit of the film it follows and a lot more spandex.
Runaway is the outlier: a Michael Crichton science-fiction thriller where she plays a police officer and nobody dances at all.