Olivia Newton-John
Olivia Newton-John was born in Cambridge, where her father was headmaster of a local boys’ school. When she was five, the family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia and that’s why Olivia speaks with an Aussie accent. She comes of an academic family - her grandfather (physicist Max Born) won a Nobel Prize for his work with the team that originally split the atom -but Olivia always fancied singing as her career.
Her first break came when she was singing in a coffee-bar run by her brother-in-law, and a customer suggested she enter for a TV pop-song contest. To her own amazement, she won and the prize was a trip to Britain.
In her home country, she worked clubs and army camps, and then got what looked like a first-rate opportunity when Harry Saltzman, the man who made the James Bond films and who launched The Monkees, chose her to join a group he called Toomorrow. However, after two years, the group fizzled out, and Olivia admits that the whole thing gave her a rather sour view of some of the phonier aspects of the show-biz world.
1974 was an eventful year for Olivia. She represented Great Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Long Live Love’, and became the first British performer to win a Grammy Award for the Best Country Record. It was “Let Me Be There’. She got a gold disc for it, as she did for ‘If You Love Me, Let Me Know’. The Grammy Award meant a visit to that shrine of stardom, Las Vegas, and in October of the same year, she was named top female vocalist by the Country Music Association of no less a place than Nashville, Tennessee.
Basically admitting to being a “home bird”, Olivia likes cooking, reading, films, and horse-riding. She also writes songs though she doesn’t read music. What she does is sing the lyrics to a tape-recorder, and then gives the tape to one of her musician friends so that the musical notation can be written in and the song arranged.
Her name has been closely linked with The Shadows in fact, she was at one time engaged to Bruce Welch and Olivia has one great ambition in common with them and their famous ex-front man, Cliff Richard. She’s determined to be a world star!
Editor’s note: This was one of the first Olivia articles I had as a child from an annual that I found in a charity / goodwill shop. I wish I knew the name of the annual.