Jennifer Grey Calls Ex-Fiancé Johnny Depp ‘Crazy Jealous and Paranoid’

While almost every detail of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s relationship is being replayed in court, Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey shared her experiences with the Pirates of the Caribbean star. In her new memoir Out of the Corner, Grey called Depp “crazy jealous and paranoid” when they were separated during their relationship. Grey, 62, and Depp, 58, met in 1989 and got engaged two weeks after their meeting. They split just before Grey turned 29.

Depp and Grey’s first date went well, Grey wrote in Out of the Corner. “We ate, talked, drank Jack Daniel’s, laughed our a-es off, took cigarette breaks midcourse. He was so ridiculously beautiful. And surprisingly open, funny, quirky and sweet,” she wrote in an excerpt The Independent published.

Two weeks after meeting her, Depp proposed, and they got a Pekinese-poodle named Lulu. “She was our practice baby and someone to keep me company when Johnny was out of town,” Grey wrote. “Johnny was commuting every week back and forth from Vancouver but had begun more and more regularly to be getting into trouble: fights in bars, skirmishes with cops.”

Depp, who was starring in 21 Jump Street, began missing flights back to Los Angeles. When he did come home, Depp would be “crazy jealous and paranoid about what I’d been up to while he was gone,” Grey wrote. She attributed this temper and unhappiness to “him feeling miserable and powerless to get off [the TV series] 21 Jump Street.” Grey called off their engagement before her 29th birthday when he left for a meeting and did not contact her for several hours.

Last month, Grey told PEOPLE there was “some heat” in her relationship with Depp. “It was a f—ing bonfire,” she recalled. “It was literally like, ‘Are you f—ing kidding me? Are you f—ing kidding me? I’ve never seen a guy like this. And energetically, what it was like being with him, it was like, “Oh, I’m being totally, totally compensated for the s— I just went through.”

Grey shot to superstardom in the 1980s thanks to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Dirty Dancing. She’s found more recent success with guest roles on Grey’s Anatomy, The Conners, and Dollface. Lionsgate is now developing a Dirty Dancing sequel with Grey involved, but there hasn’t been much news on the project since it was announced in August 2020. Grey told PEOPLE the project is still in the works. Although she knows the magic of Dirty Dancing is impossible to recapture, especially since Patrick Swayze’s death, she hopes the sequel could give a new audience the “same kind of underpinnings” as the original.

“Today, people think that their identity is limited; the world has told them what it is,” Grey said. “But there are certain people who can see other parts of you. Dirty Dancing was a fairy tale, a successful movie, and formula, using dance as a metaphor for embodying your energy and getting out of your head and your limiting belief systems.”