Double Act
There’s a dazzling new star in Olivia Newton-John’s household. She sings, she dances and she’s proving she’s a hot rising talent. And no-one is more thrilled than the 53-year-old Aussie entertainer. For the newcomer is 15-year-old Chloe Lattanzi, Olivia’s daughter from her marriage to Matt Lattanzi. Now, not only has Chloe scored herself a record contract with Vanessa Amorosi’s manager, as reported by Woman’s Day a few weeks ago, but she is also set to impress Hollywood when she struts her stuff in her movie debut, opposite her mother in The Wilde Girls, scheduled for release next year.
Olivia plays Jasmine Wilde, a world-famous who has become d and bitter about the business. So, she’s moved to a small town in Georgia, US, to work as a vet and raise her precocious daughter, Izzy, who is played by Chloe. She’s so negative about showbusiness that she confesses to her daughter, “The only way I could perform on stage was being high. I was never happy with my career. Being a star, being famous, having all the money in the world has nothing to do with happiness.”
But a life away from the entertainment industry doesn’t last long when, much to Jasmine’s dismay, Izzy has dreams of becoming a pop star. The movie, of course, is fictitious, although in some ways it seems to hit close to home. So how much of it is art imitating life? And did writer Del Shores pen the story based on anyone he knew? He admits, “Sure, there were threads in that story that are familiar in the music business. After all, Olivia started out at 15. But she wasn’t a one-album wonder. Her career has had longevity. She’s had dozens of smash-hit albums, Grammy awards and has made movies. She’s an international icon who loves the industry and feels that the business has been great to her.”
In fact, he points out that Olivia‘s main motivation in making The Wilde Girls was that it gave her an opportunity to star with Chloe. “She wouldn’t have done that if she’d had negative feelings about showbusiness,” he says. “And frankly, because Livvy started young, she could have been accused of hypocrisy if she had banned Chloe from starring in the movie.”
Yet, even with Olivia’s clout, it wasn’t easy to get the movie financed. Hollywood studios didn’t want to put up millions of dollars for the film without seeing that Chloe could act. “I agreed that Chloe should audition for the part like everyone else. It was a tough part and she had to earn it,” says Olivia, who went along with her daughter to Paramount Studios to do a screen test.
And for that crucial test, she had to guide Chloe through one tough scene in which they scream at each other. Olivia recalls, “I was thrilled with her. When she walked out on stage to do her singing, she did it like she was an old trouper. She nailed it right away and made me very proud.”
They also impressed the American producers of the show, Showtime, who gave them the green light to shoot the film on the Gold Coast in Australia, even though the story is set in the US. Throughout shooting, Olivia coached her daughter but, she says, mostly it was with simple things “like where to place the mike when we did the recordings”.
For Del, the casting of Chloe couldn’t have been more perfect. He says, “She is an absolute natural. I’ve known Chloe her whole life, since she was born, in fact. She was always a clown, an entertainer and loved being in front of people. I’d go to Olivia’s house in Malibu, where they had a little theatre and Chloe couldn’t wait to go up and perform on that stage for visitors. She’d do stand-up, she was funny and showed at an early age that she would be a wonderful actress. She has such a powerful voice and amazing singing chops.”
Filmgoers, he says, may be stunned when they first hear her fantastic voice. “I knew she could sing because I’d heard some demos and I had a gut feeling she’d be a wow as an actress.”
At the end of the movie, Olivia’s character tells her former lover, a fellow musician who had abandoned her when she became pregnant, that their daughter had grown up to be a great young woman. “She’s a special child, an amazing kid. I did a really good job with her — you’d be proud of her.”
That was movie talk, but it could also be what Livvy says about hot prospect Chloe. “She’s a wonderful kid,” says the smiling actress. In the movie, Jasmine opposes her daughter’s ambition to have a singing career. In real life, says Del, it’s the opposite. “She is supportive of Chloe. Livvy battled breast cancer and, given what’s happened in the world over the past several weeks [since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US], she knows that life is short and you should be encouraged to pursue your dreams. So she’s 100 per cent behind Chloe if she wants to follow in her footsteps.”
By Ivor Davis