Olivia Newton-John 8/2022 (73), was born on 26 September 1948 in Cambridge, England. In early 1954 the family moved to Melbourne, Australia where she was schooled and grew up, the granddaughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. As a matter of fact, her family tree, especially on her mother’s side, showed quite some prominence all the way back to Protestant theologian Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism. Newton-John’s father was an MI5 officer on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park who took German war architect Rudolf Hess into custody during World War II.
Newton-John went to primary school with Daryl Braithwaite, who also followed a singing career as lead singer for the Australian rock band Sherbet. At age 14, with three classmates, Newton-John formed a short-lived, all-girl group called Sol Four which often performed at a coffee shop owned by her brother-in-law.
Newton-John originally wanted to become a veterinarian but then chose to focus on performance after doubting her ability to pass science exams.
In 1964, Newton-John’s acting talent was first recognised portraying Lady Mary Lasenby in her University High School’s production of The Admirable Crichton as she became the Young Sun’s Drama Award best schoolgirl actress runner-up. She then became a regular on local Australian television shows, including Time for Terry and The Happy Show, where she performed as “Lovely Livvy”. She also appeared on The Go!! Show, where she met her future duet partner, singer Pat Carroll, and her future music producer, John Farrar. (Carroll and Farrar later married.)
In 1965, she entered and won a talent contest on the television program Sing, Sing, Sing. She performed the songs “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses“. She was initially reluctant to use her prize, a trip to Great Britain, but travelled there nearly a year later after her mother encouraged her to broaden her horizons.While in Britain, Newton-John missed her then-boyfriend, Ian Turpie, with whom she had co-starred in the 1965 Australian telefilm Funny Things Happen Down Under. She repeatedly booked trips back to Australia that her mother then cancelled. Her outlook changed when Pat Carroll moved to the UK. The two formed a duo called Pat and Olivia and toured nightclubs in Europe. (In one incident, they were booked at Paul Raymond’s Revue in Soho, London, and were unaware that it was a strip club until they began to perform onstage dressed primly in frilly high-collared dresses.) During this period, she and Carroll also contributed backup vocals to recordings by a number of other artists, notably the song “Come In, You’ll Get Pneumonia” by the Easybeats at the time world famous for their global number One hit “Friday on my Mind”. After Carroll’s visa expired however, she was forced to return to Australia while Olivia Newton-John remained in Britain to pursue solo work.
Laster in the decade she was recruited for the group Toomorrow, formed by American producer Don Kirshner. In 1970, the group starred in the science fiction musical Toomorrow and recorded an accompanying soundtrack album; both the LP and the movie were named after the group. That same year, the group made two single recordings: “You’re My Baby Now”/”Goin’ Back” and “I Could Never Live Without Your Love”/”Roll Like a River”. Neither track became a chart success; the project failed and the group disbanded.
Her first big splash came when she swerved into country music, assisted by her long-running partnership with writer-producer John Farrar, her friend Pat Carroll’s husband. She scored her first hit in 1971 covering Bob Dylan, of all people, “If Not For You,” soon followed by “Let Me Be There.” The recording of Dylan’s “If Not For You” became her first mainstream release. The song had reached #1 in Australia and went on to top the U.S. adult/contemporary chart, while peaking at #25 on the Hot 100.
After a couple of misfires, she returned with the country-influenced “Let Me Be There” which reached #6 pop and #7 country.
In 1974-1975, she garnered a string of hits, beginning with “If You Love Me (Let Me Know)” (#5) and then her first two pop #1s, “I Honestly Love You” and “Have You Never Been Mellow,” as well as “Please Mr. Please” (#3). These were written and produced by her longtime collaborator John Farrar. It all turned controversial however when she won a country Grammy, but it became a flat-out scandal when this “Aussie interloper” won the CMA award for Female Vocalist of the Year.
George Jones and Tammy Wynette were so outraged, they organized other Nashville veterans in a CMA boycott and founded the “Association of Country Entertainers.” It didn’t last. (The next year, the top CMA award went to John Denver; when presenter Charlie Rich read the name from the envelope, he pulled out a lighter and burned it right there on the podium. Damn, country singers were mighty feisty about awards back then.)
She remained out of the Top for her next seven releases, but returned in a giant way with 1978’s “You’re the One That I Want,” her duet with her Grease co-star, John Travolta.
She scored two more hits from the film’s soundtrack: “Hopelessly Devoted to You” (#3) and another #1 duet with Travolta, “Summer Nights.”
After so many years as the most wholesome of pop singers, her Grease makeover in 1978 was a turning point. Like Sandy in the movie Grease, Olivia got in touch with her bad-girl energy. The Grease soundtrack album became its own pop-culture phenomenon — it was one of those hit albums that people just refuse to stop buying, right up to the end of the century. “You’re the One That I Want” might have been a ringer — it had nothing to do with the Broadway musical or the Fifties concept. But it blew up into one of the era’s most irresistible hits: Olivia’s growl, John Travolta’s wounded yelps, that massive bassline, and a repeat-the-chorus outro that goes on forever, yet somehow always ends too soon.
Grease ended her “Sandra Dee phase” — once Olivia discovered the joys of black leather and sultry pouts, there was no turning back. Her next move was Totally Hot, where she sexed up her music and finally broke up with sad songs. She got more popular than ever.
“I love commercial music,” John Lennon said in 1980, right before his death. “I like Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Magic,’ and Donna Summer singing whatever the hell it is she’ll be singing. I like the ELO singing ‘All Over the World.’ I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business.’”
“Physical” became rightly her most famous hit — it was outrageous. Not because it was so explicit, but because it was so funny, with Olivia purring, “There’s nothing more to talk about unless it’s horizontally.” This was an era where it was rare to hear radio hits by 30-something adult women about “boning their brains out”, so the moms went bananas for this one, along with the kids and everyone else. You can hear a sly grin in her voice, but her vocal gets lustier as the song goes on, until the final choruses when she switches to “Let’s get animal! Animal! Let’s get into animal!”
She took the “Physical” grin even further in her unjustly forgotten sequel, “Make a Move On Me” — it’s not as famous, probably because it’s not as filthy, but it’s a song that can aways turn anyone into a Solid Gold dancer. Then in 1981 she recorded another blockbuster with the Electric Light Orchestra ELO, with the movie hit “Xanadu”. Her Eighties phase came to a fitting climax in 1985 with “Soul Kiss,” one of the era’s most explicit odes to oral sex that isn’t by Prince.
Thanks to her incredible voice, girl-next-door natural beauty, great song choices and terrific production, she continued that success with numerous other hit parade climbers.
As Best Classic Bands wrote in its 2017 concert review, “Newton-John has a big vocal range and signature sound unlike anyone else’s. At once, she delivers a breathy higher register and within the same song–as she does in “Xanadu”–also belts out her lyrics.”
She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, when the music had moved on from rock to hip hop. She devoted her later years to philanthropy and family, along with her long, brave public battle with cancer, but she never abandoned music. She recorded albums for Hallmark, plus a touching 1998 remake of “I Honestly Love You” with Babyface. Her best later album is This Christmas, an amazing 2012 set of holiday duets with John Travolta. When Olivia and John do “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” he’s is the one pleading he has to go home, while Olivia entices him to stay (“Gosh, Liv, I really do have to go,” “Been hoping, John, that you’d drop in”), until he finally shrugs, “Ugh, I’m stayin!” They also sing “Deck the Halls” with James Taylor and “Winter Wonderland” with Tony Bennett.
She inspired a superb tribute 2018 album from indie-rock legend Juliana Hatfield, illustrating how Olivia gave so many shy Gen X girls a voice they could recognize as their own. Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John put her songbook in a new light; Juliana’s “Make A Move On Me” is a real banger. (Olivia loved the album.) In Allison Anders’ 1992 drama Gas Food Lodging, Fairuza Balk is a small-town trailer-park kid who bonds with Donovan Leitch over Olivia’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 — he’s obsessed with quoting the line, “We have to believe we are magic,” until she realizes it’s his way of trying to tell her he’s gay.
Newton-John was an advocate for breast cancer research as well as humanitarian causes in later life. She earned four Grammy Awards and sold more than 100 million records worldwide. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1981.
The internet began “blowing up” in late December 2018 that Newton-John had “weeks to live.” (Similarly, on Sept. 10, 2018, there were reports that she had been diagnosed with cancer for the third time. The beloved singer was, indeed, battling stage 4 cancer in her back. As Best Classic Bands previously reported, Newton-John had postponed a tour that year due to the cancer diagnosis.) On January 2, 2019, she struck back at the end-of-year tabloid stories to proclaim in a video greeting that “the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” The singer, actress and author, looking great, wished all of her fans “the happiest, healthiest 2019 possible,” thanking them for their love and support.
Olivia Newton-John, the beloved singer, actress and philanthropist, who could hop from genre to genre with the same effervescent hyper-glitz enthusiasm, without ever sounding the least bit phony, died August 8, 2022 from cancer. She was 73.
Before fans invented the terminology of stars having “eras,” Olivia perfected the concept, because she hit every stop on the radio dial, from ingenue to Xanadu.
John Travolta said of her death: “My dearest Olivia, you made all of our lives so much better. Your impact was incredible. I love you so much. We will see you down the road and we will all be together again. Yours from the first moment I saw you and forever! Your Danny, your John!”
No Seventies star had a weirder pop trajectory, going from the world’s favorite Australian country singer to a brazen Eighties black-leather New Wave diva in just a few years. But Olivia could do it all: weepy ballads like “I Honestly Love You,” country twang like “Let Me Be There,” Fifties pastiche in Grease. Disco show tunes with Gene Kelly and ELO in Xanadu. Heavy-breathing rock odes to sex like “Magic” and “Make a Move On Me.” These are all reasons why we loved Olivia Newton-John — we honestly loved her..
