American's soft-focus sweetheart turns tough
Doris Day of the seventies? Could be: the sweet-thing image comes easily to the eye when you look at very blond-haired, blue-eyed Olivia Newton-John - who houses healthily, in Malibu, with four dogs, two cats, and three horses; who goes in for jeans, not jazziness (“I’m pretty basic”); and who has the kind of fresh, fast-talking, funny personality that adds up, in America, to strictly delicious.
In four years, Olivia Newton-John’s hooked four gold and four platinum albums with her wide-eyed, soft-voiced pop-country appeal; heated-up male fans run after her with screams of “I love you” and “Marry me Now”, comes “Grease” - and O N-J’s got her first big crack at acting: in the new movie version of Broadway’s ode to fifties felt poodle skirts and ducktailed hoods. (This, for the daughter of a college professor and the granddaughter of a Nobel laureate?)
In “Grease,” Olivia Newton-John gets her man, and the man’s hyper-sexy John Travolta. Better yet, the soft-focus sweetheart winds up a greaser. What’s a greaser? “You know,” says Olivia, “tight pants and high heels. The rough lady who gets to hang around with the greasy guys.”
Would Doris Day hang around with greasy guys?