Olivia's Xanadu

Olivia Newton-John enjoys the quiet life as much as the Wild Life, as RACHEL BROWNE discovers.

ONLY a few weeks ago Olivia Newton-John was standing perfectly powdered cheek by surgically enhanced jowl with the champagne-quaffing Hollywood A list at the world's premiere independent film event, the Sundance Film Festival. Just days after leaving Utah and celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow behind, she was scuba diving with potato cods for company on Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, filming a segment for the nature series Wild Life with Olivia Newton-John.

I know which one I prefer,

she says with that familiar girlish giggle. Today she is drinking in the view from a permaculture farm nestled in a valley between the towering McPherson Range in the west and Mount Warning in the east, a short drive away from her property just outside of Byron Bay on the NSW north coast.

This is home. she says in wistful teenager tones as she strides through the long grass and tangled vegetation towards the farmhouse where she and the Wild Life crew are breaking from their filming schedule for lunch. She pauses only briefly to admire the bright orange butterflies and psychedelic dragonﬂies buzzing about and to say hello to an emu, which looks perplexed in return.

Look at this place — it's beautiful, she enthuses as she grabs a sandwich and glass orange juice. This whole place is superb! Glorious! I love it!

So much so, the 47-year-old with the famously unlined face and lithe brown body will move back to her farm in the middle of the year, study permaculture —— environmentally friendly farming — and use it on her 80 ha property, where she grows avocados and custard apples.

She’s also considering writing a book about her life — and just spending time with her 1l—year—old daughter Chloe, from her marriage to actor Matt Lattanzi, and elderly mother who is staying at the Byron Bay house.

It's not that writing songs and making albums and movies no longer inspire her, but her priorities have changed radically since she won a talent quest on johnny O’Keefe's Sing Sing Sing in 1965, launching a career boasting 20 top-selling international albums and feature films including the blockbusters Grease and Xanadu. In the 7os there were no bigger stars in the world than Newton-John and her Grease co—star John Travolta, who remains a close personal friend.

When Newton-John talks of Travolta — whose career has reignited with Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty — there is no professional jealousy.

He’s a star and he always was a star, even though for a long time he didn’t have a big, huge hit, she says. The big hits eluded him until he did Pulp Fiction and now so many great things have happened to him. But I don’t envy him. That sort of success brings pressures of its own.

For Newton-John there was the never-ending glare of publicity and long stretches without seeing her daughter —— pressures she could live without. She's spent the past 12 months on a variety of projects travelling the world for Wild Life', playing the best friend of a man dying from AIDS in the feature film It's My Party, which opened last month, and making the album Songs From Heathcliff with Cliff Richard.

Now it's time to pursue personal interests.I'm trying to balance it all, she says. Every time I come to Australia and I get on my farm. it all kind of makes sense. Pausing, her voice softens as she reflects on her career. You know, I've done this since I was 15, I don't know anything different. It's what I do. It's interesting and stimulating, but as I get older I crave more quiet time to read and work on my farm and do the things which l enjoy. I think, because I started so young, I missed out on doing a lot of regular things, such as reading books — I'm trying to catch up now.

I'm very fortunate. I have a wonderful life. I have a great balance. I have a wonderful child life's good.

Whether she and estranged husband Lattanzi, 36, — who lives in Sydney and hosts Pepsi Max Extremists on Channel 10 — will reunite is one subject the unflappably nice Newton-John flatly refuses to discuss. Making another album is a possibility, she says vaguely, and she doesn't even have an agent on the lookout for acting roles — although she might make a film in Byron Bay with Wild Life's co-executive producer, Scott Young, later this year.

Then there's Chloe. Maybe it's her own upbringing — Newton-John was raised in the university town of Cambridge, England, before emigrating to Australia with her parents in the early 60s — but she feels Australia is a better place to raise children than Los Angeles, where she has a home in beachside Malibu.

Chloe loves it here, Newton-John says, beaming. She's back at her old school and fitting right in. She swam her first swimming carnival the other day.

Newton-John is one of a small percentage of performers with a career to span more than three decades and still counting. She has amazing tenacity, says music historian Glenn A. Baker. People forget how long she has been in international music. She made two feature films before the 60s were over. At that time people's careers were supposed to last five minutes and she's still going 30 years later!

Newton—_John is aware that she is seen as a survivor, personally and professionally. I fee] very strong, the strongest I have felt for some time, she says, recalling her father's death from cancer and her diagnosis with it too in the same month in 1992.

I have a friend who's a Buddhist. When I first went through my sickness way back, when I went through my father's death and my financial problems (the collapse of her Koala Blue stores) when I went through my stuff as I call it he said to me - Congratulations, now you will grow, and I really think that's true. It builds character and morale and makes you stronger for the next challenge.

And Newton-John is not one to shy away from a challenge. Scott Young says the host has faced up to her greatest fears on the show. We've had some nightmare trips. We've had guns pointed our way in Central America, toxic hotel rooms in Russia, death drives in Greece, but Olivia's a dream, he says. I've worked with a lot of people of her calibre and they can be pretentious, but she'll try anything. She never wanted to deal with snakes, we got her one day with a snake around her head and another around her waist and she was making jokes. She's terrified of heights and we had her 100 feet above the rainforest in Panama, on a crane! She never wanted to do diving. She just refused! We got her to dive at Lizard Island. And she'll be saying Scott, remember I'm a mother and if anything happens to me I'll kill you!'. She has a great spirit.

Wild Life With Olivia Newton-John airs Thursdays on Channel 9 at 7.30pm.