OBITUARIES
- Total Film
- JAMIE GRAHAM
Bidding a fond farewell to Olivia Newton-John, Anne Heche and Wolfgang Petersen.
To movie lovers, Olivia Newton-John will forever be Grease’s Sandy, the squeaky-clean new girl at Rydell High who affects a finger-in-socket perm and spray-on black spandex to find a love to sing and dance about with John Travolta’s ‘bad boy’, Danny Zuko. The makeover mirrored that of the singer-actor’s career. Born in Cambridge and moving to Melbourne, Australia, at the age of five when her father, a former MI5 officer in WW2, took up a post as a college professor, Newton-John won a talent show at 16.
From there she released some unsuccessful singles before scoring a hit with a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘If Not For You’ in 1971, and then making a name for herself in soft pop and country – ‘I Honestly Love You’ won her the first of four Grammys, and ‘If You Love Me (Let Me Know)’ made the US Top 10. It mattered not to rock journalists, who dismissed her as inauthentic. Newton-John herself conceded she was “nice” and “pretty boring”.
Then (greased) lightning struck. The 1978 musical was a huge hit, and the soundtrack became the second-biggest selling album of the year in the US. Singles ‘Summer Nights’ and ‘You’re The One That I Want’ were huge, while Newton-John’s ballad ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’ was nominated for Best Song at the Oscars. An OBE followed in 1979, by which time Newton-John, like Sandy, had discovered a penchant for leather. Her next album after Grease was called Totally Hot, and single ‘Physical’ topped the US charts for 10 weeks, panting out the lyrics, “Let me hear your body talk.” Newton-John decided she was not so “nice” and “boring” after all, telling Rolling Stone, “Innocent, I’m not,” and pointing out that paragon-of-virtue Doris Day was married four times.
Newton-John’s next movie, the rollerskating musical Xanadu, co-starring Gene Kelly, was lambasted, but the album went double platinum and the singles ‘Xanadu’ and ‘Magic’ soared. Likewise, 1983 romantic comedy Two Of A Kind, reuniting Newton-John and Travolta, was a dud, but the soundtrack album went platinum.
Newton-John’s career quietened in the 1980s as she concentrated on raising her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, and in 1992 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She recovered and continued to make albums and the odd forgettable movie (Score: A Hockey Musical, anyone?), while also becoming an ardent advocate for animal rights and plant-based treatments for cancer. When her cancer returned in 2017, she received some of her treatment at the Melbourne cancer research centre that she had helped to fund.
In 2018, Newton-John released an autobiography, Don’t Stop Believin’, and in 2020 she was appointed a Dame. She died on 8 August at her ranch in Southern California, and is survived by her second husband, John Easterling, and her daughter Chloe from her first marriage to actor Matt Lattanzi.
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