Olivia Newton-John
“When it came time to do this album, I’d gone through some new experiences,” says Olivia as she talks about The Rumour (1988), “I’d been raising my daughter Chloe, and had come to see things differently. I wanted the album to reflect that, and I co-wrote many of the songs myself. There’s songs about ecology, AIDS, single parenting and role reversal in marriage - different kinds of subjects from what I’d done before.” The sweet, pretty blonde girl has matured into a musical mainstay as well as a model mother.
Her first single was a recording of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You” and next came the ballad “Let Me Be There” which established her first U.S. beachhead in 1973 and won her the best country vocalist Grammy.
She donned a new, sharper-focus image when she teamed up with John Travolta to rock-and-roll in spike heels and black leather in the film version of Grease (1978) the all-time highest grossing movie musical.
After playing a romantic enchantress in the musical film Xanadu (it barely said “howdy-do” at the box office, but she met her 10-years-younger husband-to-be Matt Lattanzi (they were married in 1984), she sent music video watchers in 1981 for a spin with her sexy, sweaty hit “Let’s Get Physical” and “Heart Attack” (1982).
Some of her other hit titles have been: “I Honestly Love You,” “Have You Never Been Mellow,” and from the Grease score, “You’re the One That I Want.”
From sweetheart to temptress makes a Pop Goddess grow, but to know her, one suspects, is to know a home-loving, animal-loving, easy-going woman who has been able to teach quite a few cash registers to play her tune.
Born 26 September 1948 in Cambridge, England, the daughter of a Welsh university don and a German mother, her maternal grandfather was Max Born, a Nobel laureate in physics. The family moved to Australia when she was five and it was there she launched her singing career.
At 15, she won a talent contest that took her back to England, and by 1971 she’d been voted Best British Girl Singer, an honor she received two years in a row. Since winning her first Grammy (1973) for “Let Me Be There,” her awards have multiplied and her total record sales are in the millions.
In 1983 she teamed up with Travolta again and made the film Two of a Kind. The film received mixed reviews but the song “Twist of Fate” became a hit record.
Touring gives her sleepless nights and butterflies in her stomach, although she did manage to cap on SRO tour of the U.S. in the mid-seventies with a solo concert at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
“I don’t have the desire I think a lot of performers feel,” she told George Christy in 1983, “to get the applause. It’s not life and death to me. I like to sing, and I love doing what I’m doing, but it’s not a dire need.”
Craving things Australian, she and her ex-singing pal Pat Farrar opened the Koala Blue boutique in West Hollywood in 1984. Going with this winning idea, there are now over fifteen stores in a chain of outlets across the US and Canada, plus plans for a Koala Blue to open in Japan.
Keeping her heart in Australia, she produced a HBO special about the Aussies in 1988 to coincide with the release of The Rumour album.
In a surprise move, Olivia left her record company of eighteen years, MCA, to go with Geffen records in 1989. Her first project will be an album for children.
Olivia lives on a three-acre ranch in Malibu with what she called her “zoo,” a household filled with many animals she adores (five cats, seven dogs, five horses). She said as a youngster she wanted to become a veterinarian.
When she’s not working, the singer likes to spend time with her handsome actor-husband Lattanzi, and their daughter Chloe Rose (born 17 January 1986).