Her Life In Pictures - US Weekly

We Honestly Love Her

By David Hinckley

Radiating charm and singing with a lilting soprano capable of country ballads and empowerment anthems, Dame Olivia Newton-John captivated generations with her voice, self-deprecating sense of humor, and accessible, engaging demeanor. She was one of a kind, and the legacy she leaves is singularly sweet.

It has been declared, not without cause, that America in 1978 was a troubled land. Still shadowed by war trauma from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, not to mention unnerved by crime and inflation, Americans feared they had lost, among other things, their innocence. So it was no surprise how fiercely they embraced Olivia Newton-John when the movie Grease opened on June 16, 1978, and the singer appeared as the ultra-sweet and über-nice Sandy.

Whatever else was slipping away, Newton-John gave America back its sweetheart. Sandy Olsson, unlike Sandy Dombrowski in the original Broadway incarnation of Grease, wasn't from the US. She arrived from Australia, like Newton-John. Didn't matter. Sandy Olsson went to an American high school and she was the blond-haired, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked lass who for decades had been enshrined as the All-American girl.

Newton-John herself, who died on August 8, 2022, after a long and very public battle with breast cancer, became a fixture in American and international culture for half a century, thanks in part to the deceptively difficult trick of never telegraphing where she might pop up next. Beyond Sandy, she might be singing mellow country pop or growling, If my mama could read my mind she'd lock me up. When she wasn't singing, she was preaching the importance of protecting the environment or keeping a positive attitude about cancer. Like Sandy, she earned a rare level of endearment through the simple trick of exuding sincerity and kindness.

Yet even as Sandy was helping turn Grease into 1978's top-grossing movie, Newton-John was distancing herself from that fantasy of innocence by cutting a record, Totally Hot, whose cover had her poured into black leather with Goth-level eye shadow and black spiked heels.

While the title track of Totally Hot proved totally lukewarm on pop radio, it put Newton-John's inner tiger on the record and, three years later, she doubled down with the album Physical, whose title track bluntly told her paramour they needed to get horizontal. The single topped the charts for 10 weeks, becoming the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit of the '80s.

That three-year recalibration from Snow White to seductress, in a sense, capsulized the career of Newton-John, who was fine with scoring catchy lightweight hits that critics often dismissed as silly love songs, yet at the same time savored becoming an empowered woman who wasn't reluctant to say she wanted to get it on It was a long and winding road, and Newton-John enjoyed playing chameleon along the way.

Born in England, she moved with her family to Australia when she was 5. At 14, enamored of the girl groups popular at the time, she rounded up three classmates to form Sol 4, which briefly performed at her brother-in-law's coffee shop. She caught the eye of television producers and began appearing on local shows, featured as Lovely Livvy.

In 1964 she won the national TV talent competition Sing Sing Sing. Her prize was a trip to Britain, where she formed a female duet with her friend Pat Carroll and recorded Jackie DeShannon's Till You Say You'll Be Mine. It wasn't a hit. Neither was the ill-fated group Toomorrow, assembled Monkees-style in 1970 for a sci-fi musical comedy film. The movie bombed and Newton-John segued into a series of shows and appearances with British pop institution Cliff Richard.

She scored her first chart hit in 1971 with a version of Bob Dylan's If Not For You, but she was just another face in the overcrowded soft-pop field until writer/producer John Farrar, now married to Pat Carroll, nudged her into country. The timing was perfect as country radio was taking a soft turn itself and Newton-John delivered easy-going tunes like Let Me Be There, I Honestly Love You, and Have You Never Been Mellow. Traditional country singers grumbled that there was almost nothing country about the songs, and their frustration peaked in 1974 when the Country Music Association voted her Female Vocalist of the Year over Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton.

Newton-John was publicly unfazed. This thing about hard country and soft country just doesn't make it for me, she told Country Music magazine. It's all music.... I just happened to make a record and it was very popular. In fact, those records had their greatest success on the pop and adult contemporary charts, which is where the country music world thought she belonged and where Newton-John solidified the kind of crossover success that most artists only dream about. While the hits slowed down by 1975, her likability remained high, and in September 1976, she hosted her first American television special.

As if to underscore her rejection of narrow musical labels, she made her New York live debut in May 1977 at the Metropolitan Opera. While she didn't sing opera there, she did get approached for the Sandy role, which suggests someone saw America's Sweetheart percolating. It's also possible Newton-John was drawn to Sandy because Sandy undergoes a radical transformation from wallflower to hot ticket, and she's rewarded by riding off into the happily ever after in a cool car with her hunky guy at the wheel.

So even as the Grease soundtrack was accelerating toward eventual sales of more than 28 million copies, propelled by songs no more suggestive than the winking Summer Nights, Newton-John was finishing up Totally Hot, which she hoped would swing her back into the pop and maybe the rock lane. It did, sort of, though it yielded only one hit single, A Little More Love.

Newton-John was then teamed with Gene Kelly for the 1980 musical Xanadu, which didn't recapture the Grease magic. No matter. On October 13, 1981, the release of Physical removed any doubt she was serious about moving on from soft country and wide-eyed innocence. It was shocking enough that radio stations KFMY and KSL in Utah banned it, while MTV required her to edit the original film clip. What emerged from that conversation was a video suggesting the song was really about aerobic exercise, which is like saying Pretty Ricky's Grind With Me was about dancing.

Still, while Physical did reset Newton-John's image, it didn't install her as a rock sex goddess, perhaps because the come-on line let's get physical sounded a little more formal than classic rock invitations like Shirley and Lee's C'mon, baby, let the good times roll.

She also never approached the sales peak of Physical again. But Newton-John kept recording and performing, with a break in the late '80s to raise her daughter Chloe. She opened the Australia-themed clothing boutique Koala Blue in Los Angeles and continued her long-standing activism in environmental and animal rights causes.

Then, on July 14, 1992, she announced she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. That was a bold coming-out at a time when celebrities kept such matters private for fear of torpedoing their careers. Newton-John, conversely, became a high-profile spokesperson for breast cancer awareness, which ultimately led to her establishing the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Australia.

The disease ultimately recurred twice for her, the second time fatally, but Newton-John's 30-year campaign stressing awareness and positivity made her a prominent and much-admired force in the worldwide cancer fight. She was just an amazing person, her long-time friend Jane Seymour told NBC News. You can't ask more of a sweetheart.

A NATURAL TALENT

By Andy Abrahams

Born in England, raised in Australia, and destined for global stardom, Newton-John honed her craft on talent shows, in teen groups, and as a duet partner. But solo success would be her destiny.

Although everyone thought of her as a born Aussie, Olivia Newton-John came into this world on September 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England. Her mother Irene's father was the renowned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, and her father, Brinley Newton-John, worked in M15, the British counter intelligence agency. In 1942, Brinley was tapped to contribute to the Ultra project, where he worked on breaking the German Enigma codes that tipped off Allied forces to enemy plans.

Her family moved to Australia when Newton-John was 5 and felt the emotional reverberations of her parents' divorce when she was about 9. But when her mother gave her an acoustic guitar at age 13, music became a sanctuary for the young teen and her notions of becoming a veterinarian gave way to capitalizing on her pitch-perfect ability to harmonize, a skill that would soon launch her into local TV stardom.

At 14, Newton-John formed an all-girl group, Sol 4, with three classmates and quickly became a fixture on Australian TV shows as a solo act, often under the typically upbeat and sunny name Lovely Livvy. I think I had the dream that every kid has at 14 or 15, that they were going to make it, Newton-John said in a Lifetime Intimate Portrait segment.

During an appearance on The Go!! Show, she met singer Pat Carroll and the man who would become her producer, John Farrar. In 1964, she entered a talent contest on the show Sing Sing Sing performing Everything's Coming Up Roses and won, earning her a trip back to her birthplace. Newton-John wasn't keen on leaving Ian Turpie, her boyfriend at the time, but her mother encouraged her to seize the opportunity. She was homesick for Australia but when her good mate and performing partner Pat Carroll decided to join her in the U.K., Newton-John's outlook improved, and they took their act on the road in clubs in Europe. Their gigs as a duo came to an end after Carroll's visa expired and she went home to Australia.

Now on her own, Newton-John recorded her first single in 1966, Till You Say You'll Be Mine, and eventually made her first career stumble when she joined a group called Toomorrow in 1970. Music producer Don Kirschner assembled the band, hoping they would become a hit like his first manufactured sensation, the Monkees. Kirschner developed a sci-fi musical film also called Toomorrow, but the campy flick and the accompanying soundtrack on RCA record bombed. It was a great experience and it flopped, Newton-John said in an Intimate Portrait interview. And that was very disappointing. But nevertheless, I gained a lot out of it.

But tapping into the resilient and positive approach to life, Newton-John took the advice of her then-fiancée, Bruce Welch, who became her producer and one of her songwriters, to forge ahead with a solo career. She reunited with John Farrar (now Pat Carroll's husband) and, along with Welch, they began recording tracks for a new record, her first solo album, If Not For You.

GOING GLOBAL - by Going Country

By Roy Trakin

With the release of Let Me Be There in 1973, Newton-John broke through as a chart force in country music, leading to a Grammy and, despite protests from traditionalists, adding a pop sensibility in the genre. Along with her appearance at Eurovision and a monster hit with the breathy ballad "I Honestly Love You" in 1974, Newton-John's star was burning bright.

Long before Olivia Newton-John conquered the pop charts in the '80s, she tackled her version of country music beginning with the 1973 track Let Me Be There from the album of the same name, her third U.K. release and second. solo effort in America. For the title track of her US. debut, 1971's If Not for You, she had covered Bob Dylan's song with George Harrison from his country-flavored New Morning album, a track Harrison also previously recorded for his epic, three-album solo record All Things Must Pass.

If Not For You was Newton-John's first international hit, going to No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Adult Contemporary chart. After subsequent singles like Banks of the Ohio and covers of George Harrison's What Is Life and John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads barely grazed the charts in the U.S., she marked her emergence as a Country artist with Let Me Be There and its title track, crossing over from No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 to No. 7 on the Country chart and No. 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart. The album earned her a first Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, as well as a CMA Awards trophy for Female Vocalist of the Year, a result that didn't quite sit well with the partisan Nashville community.

Newton-John represented her native U.K. in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with Long Live Love, chosen for her by the British public in a popular vote from six entries (she would finish fourth behind Waterloo from Swedish winners ABBA). The subsequent Long Live Love album-her first for EMI Records and released in the U.S. and Canada as If You Love Me, Let Me Know - produced another crossover hit in the title track, which scored a trifecta at No. 5 on the Hot 100, No. 2 on the Country chart, and No. 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

The next single, I Honestly Love You, became her signature. Penned by Jeff Barry and Peter Allen, it was Newton-John's first pop chart-topper and third Top 10 Country hit (at No6), earning her two more Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance-Female-and leading to the album spending eight weeks atop the Country charts.

When Newton-John was named Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year in 1974, defeating the likes of Canadian Anne Murray and Nashville-based Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Tanya Tucker, her success spurred the creation of the Association of Country Entertainers a group formed at the home of George Jones and Tammy Wynette which included luminaries such as Dolly Parton, Barbara Mandrell, Porter Wagoner, Conway Twitty, and Brenda Lee, among others. The goal was to ensure the representation of traditional country artists on their own charts, distinct from performers they considered more pop such as John Denver But some country artists rallied around Newton-John, including Dolly Parton's sister Stella, who penned a song in support she called Ode to Olivia

At this point, encouraged by fellow Australian recording star Helen Reddy, Newton-John moved to the US from the UK, and continued her pop-country success with the 1975 album Have You Never Been Mellow, her first for long time label MCA Records and another that topped both the Pop and Country charts thanks to the John Farrar-penned title track (No l Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary, No 3 Country) and Please Mr. Please (No. 3 Hot 100 No. 5 Country, and No. 1 Adult Contemporary).

While her pop success slowed a bit, Newton-John continued to dominate the Country and AC charts, running up seven consecutive top 10 singles at the former, including Come On Over,

A legal dispute with MCA Records over the late release of her ninth album, 1977's Making a Good Thing Better, led to each side filing breach-of-contract actions against the other. Newton-John sued the label for $10 million, claiming the company's failure to properly promote and advertise her albums freed her from the contract. MCA asked for $1 million in damages and an injunction against her working with another label until her five-year deal was up, though she never did deliver the agreed upon total of releases.

As a result of the suit, record labels had to change their contracts to be based on a number of albums recorded rather a set number of years.

But bigger things were in store for Olivia Newton-John. She had agreed to star in producer Allan Carr's film adaptation of the Broadway hit, Grease. The sweet little pop-country singer was about to get an image - and career-makeover.

GREASE Is the Word

By Andy Abrahams

When kindly and demure Sandra Dee Olsson ditches her pale yellow cardigan, white-collared shirt, and past-the-knee poodle skirt for a leather jacket, off-the-shoulder top, satin pants, and red stilettos, she stuns her bad-boy sweetheart Danny Zuko, and the world, by becoming sultry, sexy greaser chick Sandy. Audiences bought the transformation in the 1978 movie musical Grease, bringing even more fame to Newton-John and her on screen partner John Travolta.

Newton-John's status as a global music superstar was solidified in the mid-'70s with hits like I Honestly Love You. But the angelic, golden-haired songstress would soon watch her career catapult into another galaxy.

Producer Allan Carr was casting for a movie version of the hit Broadway musical Grease when he found himself at a dinner party at Helen Reddy's house where Newton-John, her fellow Aussie, was also a guest. Little did she know that her lively conversation with Carr would turn out to be an audition of sorts for the role of Sandy Olsson, the goody-two-shoes in saddle shoes, opposite John Travolta as Danny Zuko. I had never met her before, or seen her perform, recalled Carr in Lifetime's Intimate Portraits on Newton-John. By the time dessert came, I had offered her the part. She was so delightful, funny and coquettish. But Newton-John was skittish after Toomorrow had tanked and insisted that she do a screen test.

She also fretted about her Australian accent in such a vintage American movie and wondered how her 29-year-old visage would look opposite the fresh face of 23-year-old teen heartthrob Travolta. Carr rewrote the role so Sandy was from Down Under, the cinematographer would use soft lenses to make her look younger. When she saw her screen test, only then was she persuaded that she could play the part.

During filming, the connection between Newton-John and Travolta was undeniable, so much so that everyone on set - and gossip columnists-assumed they were real-life lovers. Both denied. a romance but not the attraction (they were each seeing other people at the time). That's what kept the chemistry alive on screen, she has said.

The one hurdle left was making audiences believe Sandy's turnaround from squeaky clean teenybopper to sock-hop temptress. The wardrobe department had to sew her into her black Spandex pants, and vampy makeup helped transform her character. You couldn't imagine her making this transition but when she did, and she was all decked out in black, we had the same reaction [as the cast does in the movie when the boys whistle when she first appears], Travolta has said.

John Farrar wrote songs for the movie that weren't in the original show. They needed a ballad for her, he told Billboard in 2018. So he came up one of her biggest hits, Hopelessly Devoted to You, and also wrote the indelible for her and Travolta.

When the movie came out in 1978, the critics largely panned it (visual junk food scoffed Today critic Gene Shalit), but audiences loved the hormonal homage to the '50s, and it would go on to become one of the highest-grossing musicals of all time. It would also influence pop culture years later, from High School Musical to Glee.

Newton-John also rejected the feminist charge that only when Sandy was sexed up did she get her man. It was about choice, she wrote in her 2019 memoir Don't Stop Believin'. Wear those pants, or a dress down to the floor. Empowerment comes from calling your own shots and being who you want to be.

Now We Are Here in Xanadu

By David Michael Brown

Despite capitalizing on a roller-skating craze and topping the charts with a best-selling soundtrack, musical fantasy Xanadu was not the Grease follow-up that fans were expecting.

On paper, Xanadu was a marriage made in disco heaven. Audiences were hopelessly devoted to Livvy after Grease in 1978, Michael Beck had come out to play in Walter Hill's urban actioner The Warriors in 1979, and Jeff Lynne's Electric Light Orchestra were riding on the chart success of their eighth studio album, Discovery, which reached No. 1 in the UK and broke the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1979.

Throw in the roller-skating fad that had taken the late 70s by storm and add some old-school razzamatazz thanks to legendary song-and-dance man Gene Kelly, and this glitzy '80s love letter to the MGM technicolor musicals that Kelly made his name in became a delirious, one-of-a-kind spectacle.

When Newton-John promised to take audiences to a place where nobody dared to go, it was a sparkling roller disco frequented by hard rockers, dancing queens, and jazz hipsters. (It was also the place where she met her first husband, Matt Lattanzi.)

Despite the smorgasbord of musical styles, it's the Grease star at her most radiant who is the shining beacon of hope in the befuddling, nonsensical chaos that is Xanadu's plot.

In this tentative remake of the 1947 Rita Hayworth romance Down to Earth, Newton-John plays Kira, the human form of Greek Goddess Terpsichore. The deity is inadvertently brought to life from a mural by Beck, a frustrated Los Angeles artist, when he tosses out a failed painting. She inspires the painter to open a roller-disco club called Xanadu with the help of a past love, the clarinet-playing construction mogul Danny McGuire (Kelly, in his final role).

This delightfully crazy, high-wheeling romance that began life as a low-budget roller-disco film somehow evolved into an eye-popping fantasy folly, one that may have been savaged by critics at the time but is now hailed as a camp cult classic. The fact that it was Xanadu, along with kitschy 1980 Village People vehicle Can't Stop The Music, that inspired the celebration of Hollywood catastrophes that is The Razzies only enhances the movie's so-bad-it's-good reputation.

Even with the film's critical shortcomings and subsequent lackluster box office, the genre-hopping Xanadu soundtrack was a smash.

The album went double platinum in the U.S. and garnered five Top 20 hits. The initial release featured a selection of numbers penned by John Farrar on side one including Magic the third-most popular single of 1980 on the Billboard Hot 100 - and Newton-John's duets with Cliff Richard, The Tubes, and Gene Kelly.

The second side saw Jeff Lynne's contributions play out, including the incandescent titular theme with Newton-John that has become one of her most beloved recordings. When you hear the name Xanadu, it's that exhilarating rush of perfect pop that springs to mind, fills the heart, and gets toes tapping, not the movie that spawned it.

I had already decided about a year and a half before I did Xanadu that I was through with dancing. in fact, I wasn't going to dance in Xanadu, but several journalists told me that Olivia Newton-John kept saying how sad she was that she wouldn't get the chance to dance with me. so, I finally said, 'all right, throw in a number' but I'm through with dancing. Gene Kelly, to Interview Magazine in 1985

Gene Kelly was a lovely man and very, very, VERY hard-working and professional, Newton-John told the Tampa Bay Times in 2015. Imagine how scary it was to dance with him.

let's GET PHYSICAL

By Roy Trakin

Leaning into Sandy's image change from Grease and taking it to her own looks and sound, Newton-John ushered in the 80s with the provocative Physical, her chart-dominating hit, and its accompanying tongue-in-cheek fitness-forward video.

She would move further into the risqu&eacyte; with Soul Kiss before parenthood and the fickleness of an age-conscious industry saw her go Back to Basics with a collection of family friendly ballads.

Olivia Newton-John's starring role as Sandy in Grease not only kick-started her career, it transformed her image from a middle-of-the-road performer into something much more contemporary and edgy. The movie itself featured a Nutty Professor-like alter ego clad in spandex and exhibiting a sexuality barely hinted at before.

For November 1978's Totally Hot, her tenth studio album, she appeared on the cover in leather, aping her makeover in the film, from goody-goody Sandy 1 to the more provocative Sandy 2. The release turned into her first solo Top 10 since 1975's Have You Never Been Mellow, the first non-greatest hits album to go platinum in the US., and a phenomenon that crashed the Top 10 in Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden,

Even though singles like A Little More Love, Deeper Than the Night, and the title track demonstrated a more up-tempo, even rock-oriented sound, the album still reached No. 4 on the Country chart, with the B-side of Totally Hot released to Country radio, peaking at No. 29, her final entry at the format.

Now in-demand as a film star, Newton-John was cast in the roller-disco musical fantasy Xanadu opposite Hollywood dance icon Gene Kelly. While the movie was derided by critics, the soundtrack was certified double-platinum, spawning five Top 10 singles including the chart-topping "Magic;" "Suddenly," a duet with her old cohort Cliff Richard; and the title song with Electric Light Orchestra, which made her visible for the first time in the rock world.

Newton-John's new tough image was the perfect fit for MTV when the youth-oriented cable channel launched in 1981, especially after the release of Physical, an album in which she leaned more heavily in the modern rock direction. The album ended up going double platinum.

The title track-written by Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick - spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Her manager at the time, Roger Davies, played the song, originally intended for Rod Stewart, for her.

I knew it was a very catchy song, she told Entertainment Weekly. I recorded it and then suddenly thought, 'Goodness, maybe I've gone too far! It was a bit raunchier than I realized. Two Utah radio stations pulled Physical from the air after objecting to lyrics like, There's nothing' left to talk about/Unless it's horizontally.

The accompanying video made the steamy double-entendres explicit, though her tongue-in-cheek delivery (she appears fully clothed in a shower) led viewers to believe she was in on the joke. My minor desires turned to major needs/My needs won't be denied, she sang in slinky costumes for the Landslide video, executing moves that could only be described as dominating.

It seemed a lot for the previously squeaky-clean performer. The message was confirmed by an ABC special, her fourth. Olivia Newton-John: Let's Get Physical, which consisted of the videos she shot for each of the album's songs, revealed her metamorphosis was complete. The special went Top 10 in the Nielsen ratings, earning her a fourth and final Grammy.

I just wasn't in the mood for tender ballads, she told People about the album. I wanted peppy stuff because that's how I'm feeling... Like everyone, I've got different sides of my personality. I've got my dominant self, my need-to-be-dominated self, the sane Olivia, and the crazy Olivia. Playing these different characters gave me a chance to show strange parts people haven't seen much.

She had also been dating chiseled actor-dancer Lattanzi, 10 years younger than her, whom she met on the set of Xanadu. She kept the relationship secret for almost a year for fear the press would focus on their age difference.

The two married in December 1984, and divorced amicably in 1995, sharing a daughter, Chloe Rose, born in 1986. The two reportedly remained friends until her death.

The success of Physical spurred a global tour and a second greatest hits collection, which yielded two more hit singles in new songs Heart Attack and Tied Up.

The concerts were filmed for a television special, Olivia in Concert, which premiered in January 1983, and was subsequently released on video, earning her another Grammy nomination for Best Video Album, along with Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female for Heart Attack.

Newton-John and John Travolta re-teamed in 1983 for the film Two of a Kind, a critical and commercial disaster that failed to recreate their on-screen. chemistry in Grease but did sport a platinum soundtrack featuring the Top 5 pop hit Twist of Fate and a new duet with Travolta, Take a Chance.

She released yet another video package, Twist of Fate, which featured clips of four of the songs from the soundtrack and two new songs, the last of 12 Grammy nominations along with four awards. With 1985's Soul Kiss, Newton-John scored her last Top 20 U.S. single in the title track. It was the final incarnation of her provocative Physical persona-while 1988's The Rumour saw a collaboration with Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

By 1989, the time she released Warm and Tender, her first collection of children's lullabies, Newton-John had dropped the sex-kitten act to embrace motherhood.

Entering the '90s, Newton-John began to write more of her own music and lyrics, resulting in personal efforts such as Gaia: One Woman's Journey, her 1994 album born from her cancer diagnosis. She also threw herself into collaborations, covers, holiday albums and charity songs.

But more significant in her later years, she found joy in recording with her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi. As Newton-John told The Hollywood Reporter in February 2021 of their Window in the Wall duet, I learn new stuff from Chloe and she learns about the old stuff from me.

Like everyone, I've got different sides of my personality. I've got my dominant self, my need-to-be-dominated self, the sane Olivia, and the crazy Olivia, playing these different characters gave me a chance to show strange parts people haven't seen much. -Olivia Newton-John on recording Physical

Photo caption:The Australian singer charmed host Glen Campbell with her song Make a Move on Me at the 1982 American Music Awards She can do that any day, he joked as he announced the name of the song.

If Not For You

By Jennie Noonan

From siblings to pals, producers to romantic partners, and others whom she embraced, Newton-John was known for her boundless love and compassion for causes great and small.

Throughout her musical career, Newton-John was famous for her sparkling duets. In her private life, she's also thrived on collaborative connections. She grew up the youngest of three children, following her brother Hugh. a doctor, who died in 2019, and sister Rona, an actress who died in 2013 from brain cancer.

After scoring a trip to England in 1964 as her prize for winning the Australian TV talent show Sing, Sing, Sing, a homesick Newton-John was emboldened by the arrival of her good friend and fellow performer, Pat Carroll. The pair toured nightclubs in the U.K. and Europe as the duo Pat and Olivia until Carroll's working visa expired and she returned to Australia to marry musician John Farrar. He would later produce and write many of Newton-John's biggest hits.

While in the U.K., Newton-John, who dated Australian actor turned game show host Ian Turpie as a teen, met Bruce Welch, guitarist and songwriter with Cliff Richard's backup band The Shadows. The pair became engaged in 1968, but Newton-John called it off in 1972.

She went on to encounter wealthy shoe importer Lee Kramer during a vacation in the south of France in 1973. We met, and that was that, Kramer told Rolling Stone magazine. I hustled my way back on the same airplane as hers at any cost.

Kramer began working as Newton-John's manager, and the strain of mixing business and pleasure saw them split in 1976. Newton-John then met actor and dancer Matt Lattanzi, a decade her junior, on the set of the 1980 musical fantasy film Xanadu and they began dating.

n 1983, Newton-John and her loyal friend Pat Farrar opened their first Koala Blue retail store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. The Australian-themed sportswear business boomed for a decade before eventually filing for bankruptcy in 1991. Despite the drama, Newton-John and Pat Farrar's friendship seemingly never faltered.

The career detour away from show business also afforded Newton-John more time to focus on her personal life. On a rainy December day in 1984, she and Lattanzi tied the knot in an intimate ceremony at home. The couple welcomed a daughter, Chloe Rose, just over a year later.

When Newton-John was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, her niece Tottie Goldsmith told People magazine that while Lattanzi was so supportive of his wife, the experience highlighted the duo's differences. The people she chooses to mix with now are very spiritual, she explained. She needs to find her equal. The couple sought counseling but amicably divorced in 1995.

A year later, Newton-John met cameraman and gaffer Patrick McDermott during a seven-day commercial shoot. We'd both been through divorces, and we just had a lot in common, Newton-John spilled of their relationship to People in 2000. He's a thoughtful and considerate person and he's funny.

The couple dated on and off until McDermott mysteriously vanished while on a fishing trip off Los Angeles on June 30, 2005. A body has never been recovered, stirring unsubstantiated speculation that McDermott had faked his own death. He was lost at sea, and nobody really knows what happened, Newton-John told Australia's 60 Minutes in 2016. It's human to wonder. But you know, those are the things in life you have to accept and let go.

Newton-John was friends with American businessman and environmentalist John Easterling, founder of the Amazon Herb Company, for many years before things turned romantic during a trip to the Amazon in 2007. Long story made short, we fell in love in the rainforest, the singer spilled to You magazine. A little over a year later, the couple married in Cusco, Peru, on a mountain in the Andes, followed by a second ceremony on Jupiter Island in Florida nine days later. He's a very special human being. Newton-John told The Australian Women's Weekly in 2021. He's honest, loving, creative, funny. He's incredibly intelligent. I've learnt so much from him.... He's wonderful, he is. I lucked out.

In recent years, Newton-John had enjoyed extended downtime with her loved ones on her horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California Easterling would make his wife cannabis tinctures and plant-based smoothies while the pair relished time basking in the beauty of nature.

Newton-John's daughter Chloe Lattanzi, who is based in Oregon, would visit for months at a time. I worked my whole life, and the longest period I can remember being home was my pregnancy with Chloe and the first year or two of her life, Newton-John told People in 2021. It's been wonderful reconnecting with my baby She is my reason to be.

For Chloe, who has been open about her past struggles with addiction, anorexia and anxiety, the feeling is mutual. My mum is my hero, always has been and always will be, she wrote in a tribute published on Now to Love in 2018. From as far back as I can remember, I knew Mum was special, not because of who she was, but because of the life and love she gave me.

Never Losing Hope

By David Hinckley

From the moment she was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 1992, Newton-John became outspoken in pushing for women's health and breast cancer awareness. Her vigilance would help her cope with a recurrence in 2013, but in May 2017, she would announce that the cancer had metastasized to her bones, a stage IV diagnosis. She spent her final years fully as an advocate for all forms of wellness and a model for living with grace.

The word cancer tends to erase everything else from the conversation.

After Olivia Newton-John was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, she spent the next three decades working to convince people it should not.

When Newton-John publicly announced her cancer on July 14, 1992, she injected a note of wry dark humor: I am making this information public myself to save enquiring minds 95 cents.

For the next 30 years, she tried to save lives, and her primary weapons included a positive attitude and relentless hope. Her personal cancer battle, like many, was sporadic. She began chemotherapy soon after her initial diagnosis and underwent a modified radical mastectomy with simultaneous breast reconstruction. A woman can be traumatized, she told the Susan G. Komen center website in 1998, to wake up with nothing there.

After a year of treatment, she remained cancer-free until 2013, when she fought off a recurrence. It came back again in 2017, initially misdiagnosed as sciatica, and this time had metastasized into stage IV. By then, she told Survivor Net in 2020, she was having radiation treatment and taking hormone therapy while also employing plant-based and herbal supplements, including medical marijuana.

She had always favored a holistic approach, she told Survivor Net, focusing on diet and exercise. This helped her maintain the positive attitude she considered so critical that she advised having someone else field the inevitable phone calls from family and friends about how you're doing. It's not healthy to be talking about sickness all the time, she said. Get somebody else to do that for you so you can take time to do something you enjoy for yourself.

To promote these goals and approaches, she opened the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Heidelberg, a Melbourne suburb, in 2012. She stressed that she considered research and wellness equally important, which is why the center offers acupuncture, yoga, homeopathy, and meditation, in addition to traditional treatments.

She was featured in a 2010 breast cancer documentary, 1 A Minute. To raise funds for the center, she walked the Great Wall of China and joined her Grease co-star John Travolta in compiling a 2012 Christmas CD that featured artists like Barbra Streisand. She was the featured heroine in a comic book that promoted Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She also remained musically active, cutting several records and maintaining an extended Las Vegas residency You Have To Believe, a reworking with her daughter Chloe Lattanzi of the song Magic from Xanadu, topped the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart in 2015.

Newton-John did not use cancer as a reason to retreat, popping up in places like TV shows Glee and RuPaul's Drag Race. She often seemed more visible to the public than ever. She always talked with a genuine interest in everyone and everything, Michael Idato, culture editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, said on August 9, 2022.

Unlike a lot of celebrities, she was never performative in the way she interacted, explains Idato, who knew Newton-John both professionally and socially. Sometimes, it's hard to look at very famous people close up because your mind can get a little frazzled reconciling your familiarity with the media image, and the presence of the real person. Doubly so when you have to talk with them.

Idato adds, I think Olivia encountered that all the time. Everyone, every stranger, had that reaction to her, because Grease had kind of made her every girl's friend from school, and every boy's secret crush. But the measure of her is that she met that with enormous heart. She took a bit of secret delight in it, I think, and she enjoyed playing the part.

Her last public speaking role came during Christmas 2021 when she posted a 32-second video thanking everyone for their support and wishing them love and light. A few days before her death at the age of 73, she posted a picture of herself cuddled up to her husband, John Easterling. She was determined to remain upbeat despite debilitating pain, her friend Jane Seymour said, and OK! magazine reported that she also refused to shut down. She ordered spa treatments at the Malibu home where she spent her last days.

Newton-John didn't live a Sandy-perfect fantasy life. She battled for years to establish a career. She had to sue two record companies over contracts. She had long, fallow stretches and several high-profile projects tanked. Critics were not always kind.

But publicly, at least, she remained as sunny as Sandy Olsson, and in the end she carved a legacy that reached far beyond a memorable movie and a sheaf of hit records that millions of people still hum today.

Olivia's quote:

I want to see an end to cancer. I want to help people who are going through it, and because I'm on the journey, and I think I'm winning over it myself, I want to bring the things I've learned to the centre and to other people. - Olivia Newton-John

To find out more about the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre go to onjcancercentre.org.

Olivia's quote:

Some people call it heaven, some people call it the Universe. I just think there's a great knowingness out there that we become a part of -Olivia Newton-John 1948-2022