She wants a family the old-fashioned way - New Zealand Press Agency

By Joanne Wills, in Hollywood, Features International

Sipping a chilled fruit juice in the California sun on the terrace of her hill-top ranch-house, Olivia Newton-John was giving serious thought to her future.

Then, with a shrug of her beautifully-tanned shoulders, the girl who collected a cool 5 million for her first starring role in Grease admitted: I suppose most singers plan ahead, but I've really no idea what I want to be doing ten years from now.

But one thing I do know is that within the next four or five years, I want to settle down and start a family. And I'm old-fashioned enough not enough to want children outside marriage. I certainly wouldn't want to have kids when I'm too old to cope with them properly or to enjoy them.

But there's still a lot of things that I would like to do before I become a housewife and mother.

Among these are more concert appearances, films, and another television special.

Obviously, Grease was very important for my career, Olivia told me. But don't forget it could have been a failure and if it had been I'd have fallen on my face.

Certainly, Olivia has matured tremendously, since she moved from England to America, after what she admitted was a disastrous appearance in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Neither has she made it a secret how much she disliked the song which she sang as Britain's entry, Long Live Love.

In America Olivia almost immediately found the success which she had struggled so hard for in Britain.

It was partly singer Helen Reddy's advice that brought her to America: Helen said to me, 'If you're really going to make it in America, then you'll have to stay in America', Olivia remembers.

It has turned out to be excellent advice. Singing to college campus audiences, country-and-western enthusiasts, and even the more sophisticated clientele in concert halls and nightclubs, she quickly won over the fans and gathered a cluster of awards - including the title of the leading female singer in America.

When I won my first country music awards, Olivia told me, there were some people in the business who were rather upset that I didn't come from Nashville, that I wasn't American and that my musicians were English.

All that seemed to baffle some of those heavily involved in the country music scene out here. But my reply to critics like these was the music doesn't need a passport.

And that just because you come from one part of the world doesn't mean that you can't sing in another..

Recently, she was amused when a Hollywood gossip writer described her as a suffragette: for sexual freedom, apparently because Olivia announced that she had only ever been deeply involved with two men.

One was Shadows' founder member, Bruce Welch. The other was her manager Lee Kramer - a five-year-long romance, during which they lived together in Olivia's five-acre Malibu ranch, and shared their happiness with half-a-dozen horses, five dogs and a couple of cats.

I suppose two lovers are just a drop in the ocean by Hollywood standards, laughs Olivia, but it was true.

There were rumours, too, about a romance with her Grease co-star, John Travolta. The truth is, she says, that John and I dated on a couple of occasions and we always enjoy each other's company enormously. He's one of the nicest and warmest men that I've ever met or with whom I've worked. But, we really are 'just good friends'.

Her latest film (now screening in Christchurch) is Xanadu a £6 million musical production co-starring 67-year-old actor-dancer Gene Kelly.

Originally a television series, it spans 40 years and during the production, Olivia reached the ripe old age of 30.

Everybody there marked the occasion with a gigantic birthday cake... and a great deal of sympathy and tact, she says with a smile.

Instead of covering it with candles, there was just one large one in the centre for me to blow out. So I didn't run out of breath.

Looking back on six immensely-successful years in Hollywood, Olivia Newton-John says: I'm always much more relaxed when I'm working in America and much less inhibited.