![]() A string of TV parts followed before she traveled to Sydney for Sing Sing Sing, another talent show where she scooped the top prize of a boat trip to England. “Our wardrobe consisted of denim jeans, hessian jackets, and black turtlenecks.”Ī solo appearance aged 15 on a televised talent competition singing Summertime won her a lead role on the TV program The Happy Show. “They were sweet girls who lived to sing (like me), so we started a singing group that we called the Sol 4,” she remembered in her 2019 memoir Don’t Stop Believin’. Newton-John grew up wanting to be a vet or mounted policewoman, but aged 14, segued into performing serenades with three friends. She attended Christ Church Grammar School, then University High School. Her mother, Irene Helene Born, was the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning Max Born, a Jewish German physicist and mathematician who fled Germany with wife his Hedwig in 1933.Īged six in 1954, Newton-John emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, with her father taking up the post of professor of German at the University of Melbourne and Dean of Ormond College. Her Welsh father, Brinley Newton-John, was a former MI5 officer who worked at Bletchley Park on the Enigma project, cracking German codes, and then as headmaster of the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys. The youngest of three children, Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England on September 26, 1948. “My dream is to defeat cancer in my lifetime.” “Yes, I’ve enjoyed making records and films, but the hospital gave me a purpose in life,” Newton-John told The Times in 2019. She relapsed in 2013, and in 2017, was told the cancer had metastasized and spread to her bones. In 1999, she received the Red Cross Humanitarian Award for breast cancer and environmental charity work, and in 2006, became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “service to the entertainment industry as a singer and actor, and to the community through organizations supporting breast cancer treatment, education, training and research, and the environment.”ĭiagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, the singer set up the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne in 2008. The soundtrack was also a smash hit, selling more than 28 million copies worldwide to date and scoring a number-one hit for Newton-John and Travolta with the duet “You’re the One That I Want.In 1979, Newton-John received the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from Queen Elizabeth, while in 1990, she was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations Environmental Program. ![]() ![]() The film was a huge success, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year and the highest-grossing movie musical of all time to that point. Newton-John played the prim and proper Sandy, who falls in love with bad boy greaser Danny, played by Travolta. In 1978, she starred alongside John Travolta in the hit film version of the Broadway musical Grease. She went on to release a number of chart-topping singles, including the 1981 hit “Physical.” She also won a total of four Grammys, including Record of the Year for “I Honestly Love You” in 1974. The statement continued: “Olivia is survived by her husband John Easterling daughter Chloe Lattanzi sister Sarah Newton-John brother Toby Newton-John nieces and nephews Tottie, Fiona and Brett Goldsmith Emerson, Charlie, Zac, Jeremy, Randall, and Pierz Newton-John Jude Newton-Stock, Layla Lee Kira and Tasha Edelstein and Brin and Valerie Hall.”īorn in the UK and raised in Australia, Newton-John began recording music in the 1960s, releasing her first solo album in 1971. Jason David Frank’s Daughter Honors Late Power Rangers Actor in Birthday Tribute: ‘I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone’
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