TEvery star knows his media coronation. For Olivia Newton-John, it was the mythical scene of grease when she arrives in a perfecto and black latex pants – sewn directly on her – to seduce John Travolta on the mythical tune “You’re the One That I Want”… The nunuche and cucul Sandy suddenly turns into an electrifying bomb on a tube that will be jiggle a whole generation. And here is Olivia Newton-John becoming overnight a real planetary sex symbol, in the line of Bardot and Marilyn…
Nothing predestined the Briton to follow a cinematographic path. Her own thing was first and foremost music. Born in 1948 in Cambridge, she spent a large part of her youth in Australia, where her parents settled when she was only 5 years old. Ten years later, she is at the head of a small girl band with her friends and cuts her teeth in telecrochets and local radio stations. When she returns to England, it is to release a first single at only eighteen years old. She turns in a first musical film which will be a flop and connects her first records, including one produced by her fiancé at the time, guitarist of the Shadows.
In 1974, she broke through in the United States with her title “I Honestly Love You”. Determined to capitalize on her first successes, the flamboyant blonde crossed the Atlantic and established herself in country-pop, winning prizes including a Grammy Award. Olivia’s career then seems set when she crosses paths with producer Allan Carr who has bought the rights to an improbable comedy about the flirtations of good-for-nothing teenagers who flex their muscles in the middle of a bed of girls. gum chewers…
She dreads the turnip
Carr has already found his hero, Danny, with an ultra-slicked-back John Travolta. But he needs a well-behaved blonde girl capable of transforming herself under the lights of love… The first contact is hardly conclusive, Olivia is not thrilled, she thinks she is too old with her 29 years on the clock and feels belly full nose. “I was worried about coming back to the cinema,” she confided later. My music career was doing well and I didn’t want to ruin it by turning another turnip…”
But the first tests with Travolta are conclusive, Olivia allows herself to be convinced. The shooting takes place in a schoolboy but sustained atmosphere, the deadlines are short, it is necessary to box the comedy in two months during the torrid summer of 1977, with a low budget and a Paramount which does not believe for a second in this project. marshmallow. The legendary scene of “You’re the One That I Want” alone takes 7 hours and leaves the duo on their knees… But Travolta feels that the passage will mark the spirits, especially with this transformation of Sandy-Olivia into a vamp. “I found it bombesque, told the actor to Vanity Fair. Marilyn Monroe crossed with a biker. A mix that I knew was going to be a hit. In the play, this passage made people laugh. In the film, it had a WOW effect! »
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Disco icon
Indoors too, it’s a real tornado. Despite an atrocious criticism, the teenagers ask for more making grease one of the most popular musicals in the world: 400 million dollars in revenue, 30 million albums sold, and two stars catapulted into the sky… for worse and for better. Because Travolta and Newton-John, who have become icons of disco, will have a terrible time escaping the label that now sticks to their skin – they will reform their duo in the film Two of a Kind, which will be a resounding flop.
If John is stubborn on film sets, Olivia quickly returns to her first training by continuing to release records with more or less success. In 1981, she got her biggest score with her album Physical, which sold two million copies. The clip of the title song thrills a whole generation – thirty years later the series Glee will pay him a strong tribute with “queen Olivia herself”. She reconnected with the scene, regularly touring Australia and the United States, singing covers and releasing compilations, but would no longer find the heights of the early 1980s.
Calvary
In terms of private life, she was hardly spared: she married, gave birth to a daughter, Chloé, then divorced, met a cameraman, who ended up disappearing at sea in 2005… before he was found in Mexico, where he has rebuilt his life after years of silence. Meanwhile, Olivia remarried John Easterling, beginning a more serene relationship in her early 60s. On the other hand, she had to face several recurrences of breast cancer, no less than two relapses since the 1990s, a real ordeal that she chose to accept and overcome with philosophy. “A lot of people see it as a fight, she explained on Australian television. For my part, I see the disease as part of my mission. »
The artist has always coped, notably raising funds to finance a research center in Melbourne, the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Center, intended for the fight and prevention against the disease. And in the fall of 2019, in the midst of a relapse, Olivia auctioned off her famous provocative outfit from grease to fund research. At the time, very surrounded by her loved ones, she treated her pain with meditation and medical marijuana. In one of her last interviews, the singer said she was enjoying every minute “until the end”. “I have worked all my life, she reminded the magazine Who. Today I get up, feed my cat, my dog and my husband, usually in that order. I enjoy being a housewife. I live my life and I wonder what awaits me. I know there will be something else…”