Olivia Newton-John was a singer and actress known for a country-turned-pop musical career and for roles in movies including “Grease.”
- Died: August 8, 2022 (Who else died on August 8?)
- Details of death: Died at her home in California after fighting breast cancer at the age of 73.
- We invite you to share condolences for Olivia Newton-John in our Guest Book.
Girl-next-door singer
The British-born, Australian-raised Newton-John built her career on a wholesome, girl-next-door image, singing gentle love songs and inspiring only mild controversy when she became an unlikely country music star. She shook up that image when, following a path presaged by her good-girl-turns-harmlessly-bad role in “Grease,” she released the 1981 single “Physical.” It would be deemed the sexiest song of all time three decades later in a Billboard list.
But long before the aerobics-themed video for “Physical” made listeners want to get sweaty (at the gym, of course), Newton-John was applying her sweet voice to much tenderer tunes. It began in her adopted homeland of Australia – her family moved there when she was six – where she was singing on local radio and television shows by her mid-teens.
As the 1970s began, Newton-John started attracting international attention, having relocated to her native country of England. Her first hit single was a Bob Dylan cover, “If Not For You,” made melodic and mellow by Newton-John. It shot to the top of the U.S. Easy Listening chart in the summer of 1971, clearing a path for her easy-listening-friendly ’70s career.
Toomorrow
That career might have taken a very different turn if her previous project had taken off the way it was supposed to. In 1970, Newton-John was tapped by Monkees producer Don Kirshner (1934–2011) for his latest pre-fab band venture, Toomorrow. An updated, racially-integrated attempt at repeating the Monkees’ success, Toomorrow released a single self-titled sci-fi movie – which was so spectacularly bad that Kirshner forbade it from being screened during his lifetime – and a soundtrack to go with it.
The lone female member of the group, Newton-John didn’t get much of a chance to show off her talent in Toomorrow, relegated to singing backup and dancing while her male bandmates handled lead vocals and played all the instruments. Had Toomorrow seen the success of the Monkees, perhaps Newton-John’s career would have mirrored those of Davy Jones and his cohorts – a few years of success as a member of a band, eventually fizzling slowly amidst increasing tension.
Instead, Toomorrow fizzled fast, and Newton-John was placed at the forefront of her own solo career rather than carrying on indefinitely as “the girl in the band.” After taking off in 1971, her career skyrocketed in 1974 with the release of “I Honestly Love You.”
Chart-topping success
The quiet love song topped charts in the U.S., Australia, and Canada, including the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 – it was the first time Newton-John made it to No. 1 there. “I Honestly Love You” made a solid showing on the U.S. Country Music chart as well, reaching No. 6, one of several of her songs to appeal to a country audience in the ’70s. It would go on to win Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. “I Honestly Love You” was wildly popular. But it, like the rest of her soft pop music, was not without its critics.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand the vast appeal of a song like ‘I Honestly Love You,'” said fellow pop star Randy Newman. “I mean, it’s boring, even.” He was joined in his dislike of Newton-John’s music by members of the country music establishment, who were so disgusted by the fact that the Country Music Association (CMA) named her Female Vocalist of the Year in 1974 that they formed a splinter group, the short-lived Association of Country Entertainers, in protest.
At issue was both Newton-John’s non-American heritage – an Australian country star made little sense to traditionalists – and the tangential relationship of her music to country. She could sing with a bit of a twang and gravitated toward country-pop singles, but she was no banjo-plucker. As Grand Ole Opry member Johnny Paycheck (1938–2003) put it, “She couldn’t drawl with a mouth full of biscuits.” It was an era when the definition of country music was being strained, and Newton-John wasn’t the only pop singer to feel the effects of that strain – John Denver (1943–1997) and Anne Murray met the ire of traditionalists, too, as they sang their own versions of country pop.
As for Newton-John, she didn’t let the criticism stop her. Indeed, she barely even seemed to register it, instead continuing to chart Top-Ten country singles throughout the ’70s. She appealed to country fans with covers of songs by artists as obvious as Dolly Parton (“Jolene”) and as surprising as the Bee Gees (“Come On Over”). “Have You Never Been Mellow” (1975) was a hit on country radio as well as on easy listening and mainstream stations, as was “Please Mr. Please” (1975).
Newton-John expressed her appreciation for country music on the red carpet at the 2016 CMA Awards: “It wasn’t something I actually had planned on, but the first songs I recorded… were hits in America on the country charts. I owe a lot to country music. I love country music, and I still listen to it all the time.”
Movie star
As successful as her country pop career became, it was derailed in 1978 when she took the movie role that would define her career. It came as a surprise to many when Newton-John was approached to play the lead in “Grease,” the movie version of a popular Broadway musical. That included Newton-John herself, who insisted on having a screen test – the poor showing of “Toomorrow” had sapped her confidence in her acting abilities. But a successful screen test and great chemistry with her leading man, John Travolta, convinced her to take a chance on the ’50s-themed musical.
It was a wise decision. Grease was an instant box office hit, beloved by moviegoers and even by most critics. Much of its success was thanks to its ultra-catchy songs, many of them performed by Newton John. “You’re the One That I Want” and “Summer Nights,” both duets with Travolta, were up-tempo radio hits, while Newton-John sang solo ballads including “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee (Reprise).” “Hopelessly Devoted to You” was written exclusively for Newton-John, not having appeared in the stage production, and it became a radio hit as well.
“Grease” proved to have staying power. It smashed box office records, becoming the highest-grossing movie musical ever and holding that record for three decades until it was toppled by 2008’s “Mamma Mia!” Today, it still holds steady as the fourth best earner among musicals. It spawned a sequel, in which Newton-John did not appear, as well as a 2016 live television production and a variety of big-screen revivals in celebration of the film’s anniversaries.
Fans loved seeing Newton-John on the big screen, but perhaps what they loved best – and what drove the movie’s long-lasting success – was the infamous transformation undergone by her character, Sandy. Initially as fresh-scrubbed and wholesome as Newton-John herself, Sandy ended the movie in wildly curled hair, bright red lipstick, and the perfect bad-girl touch of a cigarette. Her iconic outfit completed the transformation: off-shoulder top, leather jacket, and skin-tight leather pants. Newton-John had to be sewn into the pants each time she wore them.
“Those pants changed my life,” Newton-John later told 60 Minutes. And there were layers to that change. Not only did they help cement Newton-John’s worldwide fame as Sandy; they also inspired a shift in her musical career. Wearing the iconic pants and singing lively numbers like “You’re the One That I Want” was, she told Rolling Stone, “…an opening up for me. I felt from it that I wanted to try different things. I was open to everything new.”
New directions after “Grease”
The first new thing was her 1978 album “Totally Hot,” a step away from the gentle ballads on which she had built her fame. Appearing on the album cover in black leather, Newton-John sang more up-tempo, aggressively sexy songs like singles “A Little More Love” and “Deeper Than the Night.”
Inspired by her box-office success, Newton-John took another movie role, starring in 1980’s “Xanadu.” But “Xanadu” bore little similarity to “Grease” beyond the fact that both were musicals, and “Grease” fans didn’t flock to the new movie’s weird mélange of Greek mythology and roller disco. “Xanadu” was a flop, though it’s gained cult classic status in the years since. Its soundtrack, featuring Newton-John alongside Electric Light Orchestra, was popular and included hits such as Newton-John’s “Magic” and “Xanadu.”
Newton-John wasn’t under any illusions about “Xanadu,” telling New Now Next, “I was embarrassed by it. I love the music, but the script wasn’t very good,” in general agreement with the critical assessment. But “Xanadu” held one special memory for Newton-John, and that was dancing with costar Gene Kelly in his final screen role. “I got to dance with Gene Kelly, how amazing is that?” she gushed in a 2008 interview.
Post-“Xanadu,” Newton-John continued the trajectory begun with “Grease” and recorded her most explicitly sexy song yet, the massive hit “Physical.” Originally written for Rod Stewart, the song didn’t leave much to the imagination: “I took you to an intimate restaurant/Then to a suggestive movie/There’s nothing left to talk about/Unless it’s horizontally.” In retrospect after recording it, Newton-John was a little horrified.
“I recorded it and then suddenly thought, ‘Goodness, maybe I’ve gone too far!'” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. “It was a bit raunchier than I realized. I called [my manager] and said, ‘We’ve got to pull this song!'” But “Physical” had already been released and was swiftly climbing to No. 1 all over the world.
Newton-John thought she could temper the song’s sexiness by making a video that focused on exercise, rethinking the meaning of the word “Physical.” Probably few listeners were fooled, but they loved the video. Released in the early days of MTV, it helped drive the network’s success. Outside the music world, the video also helped fuel a growing aerobics and fitness-wear craze. The song itself became so enduringly popular that in 2010, it topped Billboard’s “Sexiest Songs of All Time” list, finding its way to the top spot as the all-time most popular song, based on chart performance, that was explicitly about sex.
“Physical” won a Billboard Award for Top Pop Single and a Grammy for Video of the Year. It spent 10 weeks at No. 1, and it quickly went platinum. But rather than an entry to a new level of fame and success for Newton-John, it represented a peak, her last song to reach No. 1 on any major chart.
Later life
Newton-John continued her music and acting careers, still occasionally catching attention. In 1983, her single “Twist of Fate,” taken from the “Two of a Kind” soundtrack, cracked the Top Five. It was perhaps the most successful aspect of the film that reunited her with “Grease” costar Travolta. The movie itself was a flop, and it was the last leading role Newton-John would play.
Newton-John continued recording regularly throughout the rest of her life, even as she fought breast cancer that was first diagnosed in 1992. Her ordeal led her to become a leading advocate for breast cancer research, founding the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Victoria, Australia. Though Newton-John recovered from her initial bout with breast cancer, in 2017 she announced that it had returned and metastasized to her lower back. Reports later surfaced that Newton-John’s cancer had returned before, in 2013, though she chose not to make it public.
Tributes to Olivia Newton-John
Full obituary: CNN
