Actress who made her name in Grease and then went on to sell 100m records
Olivia Newton-John, who has died aged 73, should have been far too old to play the chaste teenage prom queen Sandy Olsson in the film Grease. She was 29 when the movie was made and yet the image of her dancing with John Travolta at a high-school hop came to epitomise adolescent fantasy in which wholesome schoolgirls fall for leather-clad bad boys and together find that true love conquers all.
‘‘I was worried I was too old so I asked if I could do a screen test to make sure I looked appropriate,’’ she said. ‘‘But John wanted me for the role and in the screen test it really worked between us.’’
Adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name and set in 1950s America, Grease was the peak of her acting success. There were further lead roles, including a reprise of her partnership with Travolta in 1983’s Two of A Kind. But in the public’s imagination she was forever cast as Grease’s eternal teenager, seen first in a demure frock with fringe and bob and then in black spandex pants with an extravagant bubble perm as the film tracked a time-honoured youthful rite of passage.
That she never repeated the movie success of Grease did not bother Newton-John, who saw herself as primarily a singer rather than an actress. The two came serendipitously together when the movie’s soundtrack gave her three top-five hits in You’re The One That I Want, Hopelessly Devoted To You and Summer Nights. She went on to become one of the biggest-selling female artists in history, her record sales eventually topping 100 million. In Australia, she was made an OBE in 1979 and a dame in 2019.
Although an Australian citizen and an American resident for much of her life, she was born in England. Her mother, Irene, was the daughter of the Jewish Nobel Prizewinning atomic physicist Max Born, who left Germany for Britain with his family before World War II to escape Nazism. Her Welsh father, Brinley ‘‘Bryn’’ Newton-John, was an MI5 officer who worked on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park, spoke fluent German and was charged with taking Rudolf Hess into custody after Hitler’s deputy had flown to Scotland on his bizarre peace mission in 1941.
She remembered her father keeping a pistol in his pocket, but said: ‘‘He never talked about what he did, he wasn’t allowed to.’’
The family emigrated to Australia when she was 6. Three years later her parents separated. ‘‘We went from living in the college to my mother and I living on our own. That was pretty traumatic.’’
In adult life her own personal relationships were similarly complex. In the 1970s she was engaged to Bruce Welch of the Shadows but they never married. In 1984 she married the actor Matt Lattanzi, whom she met on the set of the film Xanadu. They had a daughter, the singer and actress Chloe Lattanzi.
Her marriage to Lattanzi was annulled in 1994 and she had an 11-year relationship with Patrick McDermott, a cameraman, until he disappeared during a fishing trip off the Californian coast in 2005. A US Coast Guard investigation concluded three years later that McDermott had been lost at sea. In 2008, she secretly married John Easterling, owner of a company specialising in new-age remedies.
In her early years in Australia, Newton-John’s chief passion was horse riding, but at 15 she won a television talent contest. Part of the prize for winning the talent show was a trip to London, but she delayed taking it up for a year. ‘‘I found it totally overwhelming and I wanted to go home and see my boyfriend.’’
Her mother wanted her to enrol at Rada but she was more interested in singing than acting. Cliff Richard was an early champion and she appeared regularly in his TV show, but she had been in London for six years before she scored her first chart hit in 1971 with an easy listening, country-tinged version of Bob Dylan’s If Not For You.
She was chosen to sing the British entry in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, Long Live Love, but came fourth. Reinventing herself as a country singer she topped the American charts with I Honestly Love You and Have You Never Been Mellow. Her success persuaded her to move to the US, where she appointed the Hollywood impresario Allan Carr as her manager. He then put up $6m to produce Grease and ensured that his client was cast in the lead female role.
However, the follow-up Xanadu, in which she danced with Gene Kelly, flopped badly, although the soundtrack gave her three hits, including Magic, which went to No 1.
The raunchily carnal lyrics of her 1981 hit Physical, which topped the American charts for 10 weeks, found her leaving behind her ‘‘girl next door’’ image.. At the peak of her chart success, she took several years out while bringing up her daughter, before returning in the late 1980s with an album produced by Elton John, only for her career to be put on hold again when in 1992 she was found to have breast cancer, on the same weekend that her father died of cancer.
She made a full recovery, an experience that sparked an intense interest in yoga, meditation and other alternative and new-age therapies. ‘‘I think we find strength we don’t expect to have,’’ she said.
Newton-John always retained a winsome girl-next-door fragility about her. And she always insisted that, away from the ‘‘vulgar’’ business of show business, she was still just that. ‘‘Criticism doesn’t upset me any more,’’ she said once. ‘‘I figured out there are lots of people out there who like white bread.’’
After her treatment she returned to Australia, where she wrote a set of songs that chronicled her illness and recovery and released them as a kind of spiritual self-help manifesto on the album Gaia: One Woman’s Journey. ‘‘My whole cancer journey was so I could help people.’’
Further albums of ‘‘healing’’ songs followed and she built the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, leading a three-week walk along the Great Wall of China to help to fund the project.
She was also a passionate supporter of environmental causes; she once cancelled a tour of Japan to protest at the slaughter of dolphins caught in tuna fishing nets and was a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme.
In May 2017, it was announced that her breast cancer had returned and she was undergoing a course of photon radiation treatment. – The Times, Telegraph Group
‘‘I think we find strength we don’t expect to have.’’
Olivia Newton-John on her experience of ill-health
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