Olivia Newton-John
When you’re the girl who accompanies Cliff Richard on his first dust record and then appears regularly in his TV shows it must be very difficult not to get a name for yourself very quickly.
We’ve also seen Olivia on the silver screen in a film titled after the group she first made her name with “Toomorrow”
1971 was a big year for Olivia and after she sent her records slicing through the charts she very soon endeared herself to young and old alike.
Olivia took to the world of entertainment like a duck to water but oddly enough she wasn’t born into a show business family. Her Welsh-born father had an academic background and her German mother was the daughter of a Nobel Prize winning physicist.
But nevertheless the urge to make music came to Olivia at an early age. By the time she was five years old the family had moved from Wales to Australia. Her father became Master of the Ormond College and it was there that Olivia spent all her spare time and time that she couldn’t spare making up tunes on the family’s grand piano.
Soon she was entertaining friends with her own musical comedies.
Olivia and three other girls started a singing group, called The Sol Four, two years later but when this began to interfer with school the group was disbanded.
Olivia then began singing on her own in a coffee lounge owned by her sister’s husband.
One impressed and obviously satisfied customer suggested that she enter a contest being run by the then reigning Australian musical personality, Johnny O’Keefe. Inevitably Olivia won the contest but because of school it was more than a year before she could enjoy the prize-a trip to London.
The singing and dancing double act with fellow Australian Pat Carroll materialized soon after Olivia’s arrival in London. Their success was short lived because Pat’s visa ran out and she had to return home. Happily her partner stayed.
And Olivia says of her interests “listening to records and being be anywhere where there is sun. I’m also mad about my two red setter dogs and horse riding.”