![]() “Well, after reading the script and meeting with John Travolta and the director, the next step was to do a screen test to see how well we worked together. You don’t often get the chance to do two different things in one movie plus, it was a musical, which wasn’t too far away from what people are used to seeing me doing.” Then in the climax, I decide to become a greaser to try ’n get the guy. really, starting out as a sweet, lovable innocent. I thought it was a great vehicle for me because I play two characters. “But I just had a gut feeling about the part. “It was pretty scary,” Olivia Newton-John murmurs in her wispy Australian-British accent. That’s quite an accomplishment for someone her age, to come back in time and be demure and innocent and all those other schoolgirl things!” “She’s a complete lady with all the normal feelings of a woman-not a child. “I sometimes wonder if the public really thinks Olivia’s full-grown,” frets manager/boyfriend Lee Kramer. Olivia’s role in this quasi-historical curveball was a potentially demanding one, requiring an off-handed comedic sense, canny dancing and lip-syncing skills, phis the ability to enthusiastically epitomize a comely high school cheerleader who boasts all the unbending inner strength of a soda straw. Infatuations like these during the frigid Cold War era? With Mamie Eisenhower in the White House?! Never happened. Playing the Sandra Dee-like Sandy Olsson to John Travolta’s duck-tailed Danny Zuko in Paramount’s screen adaptation of Broadway’s Crease, Olivia propagates the foolish myth that middle-class debs of the ’50s dug the sweaty leather thugs who sat in the backs of their English classes reading books like Rear-end Romeo, while lancing the boils on their filthy necks with snitched fountain pens. ”Īfter a circuitous career that spans almost two decades and at least three continents, producing five gold and three platinum albums, a slew of top-selling singles (“Let Me Be There,” “If You Love Me, Let Me Know,” “Have You Never Been Mellow,” “I Honestly Love You,” “Please, Mister, Please” and the new “You’re the One that I Want,” with John Travolta), along with three Grammys and a glut of other awards and citations, O N-J is nearing a new peak that puts her right back where she started: in her guileless teens. It’s not easy being the Eternal Ingenue but at 29, Olivia Newton-John is bearing up nicely-not that she’s ever managed to stray very far from the maiden image that enchants her millions of admirers. mostly, because I drank too much, got sick, and threw up all over his beautiful car.” Everywhere we went we drank champagne, glass after glass, champagne on top of champagne, and we danced! It was quite a night for a teenager who had never been exposed to such things, and I’m sure I’ll never forget it. I had never been out in one before! He took me to dinner at a fancy restaurant and then we started going round to expensive nightclubs, another and another, all over town. “He sent me a dozen roses beforehand and I was so impressed! He was very well-off and flashy, a member of the English rock group, the Shadows, and he picked me up in a Rolls Royce. “I was 17 and newly arrived in London from Australia when I went on my first big date,” she details dreamily. She shows an adolescent smile and then her eyelids slip over those bottomless pools of blue-green as she appears to drift backward in thought, to a moment and a gift from long ago. ![]() ![]() From the little orange barrettes that lift her aureate hair from her temples, to the natural flush upon her cheeks, there seems no limit to her chaste radiance, no flaw to diminish the intoxicating power of her vestal charms. Dressed in a downy cotton jersey and baggy wheat-colored slacks, with black one-strap slippers topped by the impossibly neat folds of her white ankle socks, she is a vision of innocence.
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