Jennifer Grey's mom dies 'by her own choosing' after cancer diagnosis

Jennifer Grey honored her mother, actress Jo Wilder, who died at age 94 on July 4, 2026, shortly after a lung cancer diagnosis, noting that Wilder chose to end her life on her own terms.

Jennifer Grey is sharing an emotional tribute to her mom, Jo Wilder, who died "on her own terms" a week after being diagnosed with cancer.

The "Dirty Dancing" star, 66, announced the death of her mother in a July 7 post on Instagram. She said Wilder died three days earlier, July 4, soon after receiving a diagnosis of lung cancer.

"My mother, Jo Wilder, passed away on July 4th at 94 — by her own choosing, on her own terms, exactly as she lived," she said. "A week earlier, she learned she had lung cancer. True to who she was, she chose grace over fear, understanding that leaving this world with dignity is an honor, not a tragedy."

Like her daughter, Wilder was also an actress, with stage credits including "The Threepenny Opera" and "Gypsy" and TV credits including "How to Marry a Millionaire." She shared Grey with her husband, Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey. The couple divorced in 1982. They also had a son, Jennifer's brother James.

"She was gorgeous and talented — a promising young actress on the New York stage in her youth," Grey wrote on Instagram. "She used to say she never fully answered that calling; she became a mother instead. If she'd chosen ambition over my brother and me, we never would have had the mother we had. Her passion found other outlets: she was a lifelong activist, fiercely attuned to right and wrong. And for years, many people discovered her extraordinary eye through Wilder Place, her store on Melrose.

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"She was brave and deep. I love you, Mom. Thank you for showing me how to do it all, even this, with grace," she concluded.

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According to Grey's 2022 memoir, "Out of the Corner," Wilder was born in Brooklyn and "pretty much raised herself, hanging out in Brownsville, the streetwise daughter of a pharmacist." She and Grey's father, who came to the United States from Ukraine at 13, had known each other through mutual friends before they ran into each other again at a furniture auction and got engaged just three weeks later.

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"The story passed down to me was that my mother gave up her career when she married my father, but I don't think she signed on believing that was the plan," Grey wrote in the book. "She told me that early in their marriage it became clear that it wasn't practical for there to be more than one actor in the family, and that, according to her, my dad 'needed it more.'"

Elsewhere in the memoir, Grey reflected on how her mom "looked like she was born to be on the stage" and would constantly sing around the house.

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"I could sense an intensity fueling her singing of show tunes and opera around the house, the volume and vibrato reverberating against the tiled bathroom walls as she bathed me, more suitable for a stage than a bath-time melody," she wrote. "Like she'd been cast out prematurely, unfairly rejected from her intended trajectory. I felt her unspoken request for a kind of undivided attention and intuited that I somehow owed her at least that, which put me in a bit of a jam because it really bugged me."

In a 2022 interview with People magazine, Grey said she spoke with her mom and dad "every day." And in a post on Instagram that same year, the "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" star said she was "acutely aware of how awe-inspiring and magical my mother was" when she was growing up, but "now, as a mother myself, I am even more grateful for the woman I was fortunate to call my mom."