OLIVIA: IS SHE AS SWEET AS SHE LOOKS?
Sweeter!!! Olivia (or Livvy, as friends call her) is a love. Everyone who meets her is charmed not only by her lovely face, her sweet voice, but by her gentle manner and attitude.
“People don’t want to hear that you’re nice, but that’s what I am,” Livvy says. “In fact, I’m even boring. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t get into anything strange.”
To date, the strangest thing Olivia has done is her “out-of-character” role as Sandy in Grease. Throughout the film, she remained true to her image, very innocent and cleancut. Then, at the end, suddenly, she switches to a sexy “tough broad” greaser type to attract Danny (played by John Travolta).
Olivia’s getup in the film was certainly the high point of the movie! Seeing her in that skintight, colorful outfit and her “teased” hair and heavier makeup was so unexpected, it earned Olivia gasps and applause in the theaters.
“It was pretty scary,” Olivia says of her dual role. “But I just had a gut feeling about the part. I thought it was a great vehicle for me because I play two characters, really, starting out as a sweet, lovable, innocent. Then in the climax, I decide to become a greaser to try ‘n get the guy. You don’t often get the chance to do two different things in one movie, plus, it was a musical, which wasn’t too far away from what people are used to seeing me doing.”
Olivia says her role as Sandy was quite different from her real-life story. “I was born in ‘48, so when the ’50s were going. I was a bit young. My adolescence was spent in Australia - I was born in England and moved there when I was five. My parents separated when I was about 11, and I lived with my mother in an apartment in Melbourne, attending a state school and then University High. My life was uneventful until I was 15 and started singing professionally. Before that, I was pretty shy. Overall, I didn’t go out a lot or hang ‘round with fellas.
So, like Sandy, Olivia was really innocent and sweet as a teen. That didn’t change much, even though she was in a cut-throat business.
Even now, she retains that image and seems to live up to it. Her manager/boyfriend, Lee Kramer says his lady is “humane, thoughtful, with an immense amount of warmth and humor, and she doesn’t have a bad word to say about anybody She is exactly what she appears to be. She’s what all the public thinks she is…”
Olivia jokes, “At times, I feel like the 1978 equivalent to Doris Day. There are those who think I can’t be as straight as I look. That’s why there’s always someone trying to dig up dirt on me. Yet I can’t become something I’m not.”
Olivia did become something she’s not so convincingly in Grease, she’s been asked to star in another film.
As John Travolta found out, and her next leading man will, too, Livvy is a doll to work with. She’s cooperative, professional in her attitude (though she still lacks much experience), and sweet as can be there’s no other way to put it! Olivia is as sweet as she looks.
Expect her to go all the way to superstardom in music or acting!