A certain idea of carelessness and lightness. This is the image that stuck to the skin of Olivia Newton-John. The Australian-British singer and actress, inseparable from her character in the musical Grease (1978), died Monday, August 8, at the age of 73, in his property in Santa Ynez (California), following breast cancer.
Olivia Newton-John, in 1980: “The world is so sad, so depressed, that we need to laugh, to love, to dance…”
Born in 1948 in Cambridge (United Kingdom), the star with 100 million albums and four Grammy Awards is not the first person in his family to have made history. His father, Brinley Newton-John, had helped crack Enigma – a cipher system used by the German military to encrypt communications during World War II – and helped arrest Nazi Rudolf Hess in 1941. grandfather on the maternal side, the German physicist Max Born, was the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for his discipline in 1954.
Very early on, Olivia Newton-John devoted herself to music, encouraged by her mother. At the age of 15, she was revealed by a telecrochet in Australia, where her parents emigrated when she was younger. At Eurovision 1974, she represented the United Kingdom, with the naive Long Live Love. Decked out in an improbable baby blue frilly dress, she still finished fourth, bowing to the irresistible Waterloo Swedish ABBA.
unwavering friendship
The same year, the artist released a country album, If You Love Me, Let Me Know. His flexible and enveloping voice as well as his songs, whose love is the main concern, quickly earned him the fervor of the public. The Ballad I Honestly Love Youin particular, gave her the top spot in the Billboard rankings in the United States for the first time – she also held it in 1975, with Have You Never Been Mellow.
It is John Travolta who slips his name to play his partner in the film Grease – “gomina”, in French –, by Randal Kleiser. The star of Star Wars Carrie Fisher was once considered for this role of Sandy Olsson, in which the blonde Olivia Newton-John reveals herself, solar, first as a tidy little girl with a ponytail, then as a seductive rebel with feline curls, all of leather clad. The film, with immediate and worldwide success, relaunched the fashion for drive-in cinemas and propelled the singer to the top. The two actors will retain an unwavering friendship from this collaboration.
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