As graceful in his approach to death as he was in life, Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the age of 57. I met the actor in 1995 at a turning point in his career, just as the sexy lustre of Dirty Dancing and Ghost was beginning to wear thin. It would have been easy to mock Swayze as a crank for his New Age eccentricities, but his charm, his ingenuousness and his can-do ebullience - a determined energy that also distinguished him in his fight against pancreatic cancer - all proved irresistible. Here is a slightly edited version of that encounter.

Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.