Olivia and HBO salute Australia
By Jerry Buck Associated Press Writer, Los Angeles
Singer Olivia Newton-John covers Australia, from the Sydney Harbor Bridge to the vast, dusty outback, in her HBO special, a musical salute to the 200th anniversary of the nation down under.
“We were in the desert and it was 115 in the shade,” she said. “They’d squirt me with a water gun and I’d be dry in 10 seconds. Then we went to Tasmania and took a full orchestra down into a cave. It was freezing cold.”
“Australians joke about Tasmania,” she said. “It’s an island at the bottom of the country. It’s very small, but it is so beautiful. I did a song at the old prison colony at Port Arthur on the island. It’s right on the ocean and had no windows, and Tasmania is so close to the Antarctic Circle.”
The one-hour special, “HBO World Stage: Olivia Newton-John in Australia” will air Sunday on. Home Box Office.
“I’ve always wanted to do a special in Australia,” Newton-John said. “It seemed like a great time to do it because of the bicentennial.”
She was born in England and moved with her family to Australia when she was 5. “I left at the age of 15 when I won a talent contest,” she said. “The prize was a trip to England. I came here from England about 14 years ago. My mother and dad and brother still live in Australia. I own an avocado farm in New South Wales.”
This is the second HBO special for Newton-John, who is probably best known for such movies as “Grease,” “Xanadu” and “Two of a Kind” and her hit video “Physical.” She starred in a 1983 HBO special, “Standing Room Only: Olivia New-ton-John in Concert.”
For this special, she said, “We covered 6,000 miles in six weeks. Australia is so vast and there are so many places to shoot, the director had to scout locations. He had blue skies when he scouted the areas. Then the skies turned gray and it rained when we filmed. We had to shoot anyway because we had so little time.”
The special contains, songs from her new album, “Rumour,” which is just arriving in stores. She wrote four of the 10 songs on the album and recorded an extra song for the special.
“We were in Sydney Harbor for the opening of the bicentennial,” she said. “We got a one-second shot of Prince Charles on his boat. That was the most incredible day of my life. There must have been 10,000 boats in the harbor.”
“We were on an Australian destroyer, HMS Hobart. We filmed me singing on the ship, in the showers, in the mess, all over the ship with the men. Throughout the special we use all real people. There are no actors. I just asked questions. I got a lot of different answers to the same questions.”
The special also takes her to the beaches, a wildlife park, Melbourne, the outback, a fireworks display in Sydney Harbor, a sheep-shearing, and a talk with locals at a “Crocodile Dundee”-style bar.
One place she didn’t visit for the special was the Great Barrier Reef. A storm kept them away during her last days there.
She still spends a lot of time in Australia at her avocado farm. “It’s semi-tropical and very humid,” she said. “The soil is red with a lot of minerals. You have to cut the grass twice a week in the growing season. I keep a garden when I’m there. We planted some cuttings two years ago and now they’re hedges 6 feet tall. There are some giant fig trees in a nearby rain forest. One of the giant trees is the one Captain Cook saw from his ship in the 1700s.”
The singer is married to actor Matt Lattanzi and they have a 2½-year-old daughter, Chloe Rose. Lattanzi was in the movies “My Tutor”, and “Blueberry Hill” and has been cast in a new Disney movie.
Newton-John and business partner Pat Farrar have 15 stores that feature Australian products and their own line of clothing. Each Koala Blue store also has a milk bar that sells Australian milk shakes, which are thinner than American shakes.
“We started with Australian imports,” she said, “then we began designing our own line of clothes. We use Australian-designed fabrics and the vivid colors you see in Australia.”
Newton-John’s film career has been on hold since the birth of her daughter. Her last movie, “Two of a Kind,” was a box office and critical flop in 1983.
If you’re watching “Olivia Newton-John” will air Sunday at 10:30 p.m. on HBO.
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