Olivia Newton-John, in a frame from the movie ‘Grease’.
Olivia Newton-John dies at the age of 73, a victim of breast cancer against which she had been fighting for three decades
Sandy turns. She smiles. She puts out her hand and says goodbye to all her friends who are at the end-of-year fair. Beside her, Danny drives with the love of her life. Sandy, the posh girl who abandons her hair bows and thin jackets for leather clothes and very long red heels, was the role with which Olivia Newton-John became known to everyone, who wondered who She was that Australian who made a very young John Travolta fall in love to the marrow, who had just made the whole world dance with ‘Saturday Night Fever’.
This Monday night, John Easterling, Newton-John’s husband, reported that his wife had died at the age of 73 on the family ranch in Southern California, surrounded by her loved ones, due to breast cancer. faced for more than three decades and had reappeared three years ago for the third time. “For me, it’s better not to have a clue what to expect or to know how long a person lived with my diagnosis,” he said on Australian television a few years ago. His cancer, which he beat in the first two battles in 1992 and 2013, was stage four with metastases.
Despite the difficulties caused by her illness, she continued with her mission of raising awareness in society about the importance of prevention and the need for funds to fight cancer. She came to auction objects from her most iconic movie. Precisely the family asked that her privacy be respected and that flowers not be sent and the money be spent on donations to fight this disease.
The general public knew her thanks to the film, but Olivia Newton-John was no novice. She was 29 years old (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1948) when she starred in the musical that changed her life. She had started her artistic life in Australia, where she had moved with her family when she was five years old and there she developed her musical career. First with a group of classmates from school and then alone. She is 18 years old she recorded a single after winning a talent show.
He had released eight albums before the Randal Kleiser film, formed a duo with Pat Carroll and had entered Eurovision representing the United Kingdom with ‘Long Live Love’ in 1974. He finished fourth in a contest that ABBA won with ‘Waterloo ‘. A year later she reached number one on the American charts with ‘Have You Never Been Mellow’ and also settled permanently in the United States to cement her musical career focused on pop and country.
The madness
‘Grease’ was a tsunami. The big-screen version of the musical, released six years earlier, broke the box office in 1978. It premiered on June 16 – in Spain it had to wait until September 22 – and it was a success. It cost six million dollars and raised almost 400 million.
Even twenty years later, when it was re-released, it made another $29 million. And 40 years after its smash hit, the original cast was reunited, with Travolta and Newton-John dressed just as they were then. “My dearest Olivia, you made our lives so much better. Your impact was incredible. I love you very much. We will see each other on the road and we will all be together again. Yours from the first moment I saw you and forever. Your Danny, your John! », Travolta said goodbye to her Sandy on social networks. The insistence of Travolta, who was 23 years old at the time, was essential for her to make the film. She assured that if it weren’t for the American actor, she wouldn’t have done it.
Five years later, both actors repeated in the romantic comedy ‘Tal para cual’, which was a small fiasco at the box office. The public expected something more with glitter, leather, leggings and skinny pants and it was nothing like that. Neither had ‘Xanadú’ (1980), Newton-John’s next film after ‘Grease’, worked well with the public. It was also the musical, but the mix of contemporary and classic themes didn’t catch on despite the presence of Gene Kelly and the prestigious ELO (Electric Light Orchestra).
At the same time that he made his best-known films, Newton-John continued his musical career, so that he also achieved success with ‘Physical’ (1981). Throughout his career he won four Grammy Awards. The actress and singer had a daughter Chloe with Matt Lattanzi, with whom she was married between 1984 and 1995. She had a long relationship with Patrick McDermott, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 2005. Three years later she married John Easterling, magnate and guru of health. They had met through mutual friends.