Olivia Newton-John—the Golden Globe-nominated star of Grease, singer, and devoted campaigner for environmental and animal rights—has died at the age of 73. The news was confirmed in a statement on August 8 by her husband, John Easterling, who said that Newton-John had “passed away peacefully at her ranch in Southern California this morning.” While the cause of death was not stated, Easterling noted that Newton-John “has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer.” She is survived by her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi.
The Anglo-Australian four-time Grammy Award-winning performer played sugary Sandy Olsson, the 1950s good girl in Grease. “You’re the One that I Want,” her duet with co-star John Travolta in the 1978 film adaptation, remains one of the best-selling singles of all time.
“She had a brilliant voice, and I didn’t think there could be any more correct person for Sandy in the universe,” Travolta told Vanity Fair in 2016, comparing her casting to “putting Taylor Swift in that role today.”
One of the world’s best-selling recording artists of all time, Newton-John’s six-decade-strong career commanded classics including “Physical” (1981), which she performed on Glee in 2009, and “Twist of Fate” (1983), featured on the soundtrack of season two of Stranger Things (2017). She sold over 100 million albums, had 10 number one hits—including the pillowy “Have You Never Been Mellow” (1975)—and over 15 top-ten singles. In 1999, she won an Emmy award for outstanding original song with “Love Is A Gift.”
When Newton-John first met Grease producer Allan Carr at a Hollywood dinner in 1977, her repertoire already included 2 million singles and 1 million country-lite albums sold. “She was so funny, quite warm, and oh so beautiful,” he told The New York Times in 1978. “I told her immediately she was everything a movie star should be, and she’d be perfect for my movie. She just stared, not knowing who I was. Then she bit her lip and crossed her eyes, which she does when she gets nervous. I said I was really serious and all of sudden she said, ‘Well, so am I.’” Her screen test—the drive-in cinema scene—was “so perfect we used it in [the] film itself.”
Though canned by critics, Grease made $9.3 million in its opening weekend, becoming the biggest box-office hit of 1978 and highest grossing musical film of all time, until the release of Mamma Mia! in 2008. Famously sewn into her black satin pants for the final scene, Newton-John sold them at auction in 2019 to Spanx founder Sara Blakely for $160,000. “I thought it was the bomb,” Travolta told Vanity Fair of Sandy’s transformation from virginal to vixen. “She was like Marilyn Monroe mixed with some motorcycle chick. The mix of that, I knew, was going to be outrageous. In the play it was a laugh. In the movie, it was like, ‘Wow!’”
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. 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.”
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, the singer set up the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne in 2008. She relapsed in 2013, and in 2017, was told the cancer had metastasized and spread to her bones. “Yes, I’ve enjoyed making records and films, but the hospital gave me a purpose in life,” Newton-John told The Times in 2019. “My dream is to defeat cancer in my lifetime.”
The youngest of three children, Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England on September 26, 1948. 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. 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.
Aged 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. She attended Christ Church Grammar School, then University High School. Her parents divorced when she was 11.
Newton-John grew up wanting to be a vet or mounted policewoman, but aged 14, segued into performing serenades with three friends. “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’. “Our wardrobe consisted of denim jeans, hessian jackets, and black turtlenecks.”
A solo appearance aged 15 on a televised talent competition singing Summertime won her a lead role on the TV program The Happy Show. 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. Rejecting her mother’s plea to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), Newton-John instead took the trip and submerged herself into London’s Swinging Sixties music scene.
She recorded her first single, “Till You Say You’ll Be Mine,” at 18 in 1966, and in 1967, teamed up with Australian singer Pat Carroll to form Pat and Olivia, touring nightclubs across the U.K. until Carroll’s visa expired, and Newton-John joined producer Don Kirshner’s pop group Toomorrow. They starred in an English “space musical” in 1970. “What can I say but it was terrible and I was terrible in it?” Newton-John told the New York Times in 1978. “They kept telling me I had to project so I went through the whole movie shouting.” The group disbanded, and she was cautious not to slip up with Grease. “I was very anxious about making another film because my music career was going well,” Newton-John told Vanity Fair in 2016. “And I did not want to mess it up by doing another movie that wasn’t good.”
The 1970s were her decade. Her first international hit was “If Not For You” in 1971 and her third solo album, Let Me Be There in 1973, won a Grammy Award for best country female vocal performance with the title track. She won a Grammy for record of the year with “I Honestly Love You” in 1974—the same year she was the British entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest, coming fourth, with ABBA taking home the prize for “Waterloo.”
Newton-John eventually rejected Carr’s offer of returning for Grease 2 (1982) and instead starred in the musical film Xanadu (1980) as a roller-skating Greek muse. While the film was initially a disappointment both critically and at the box office, it later became a cult classic, in no small part thanks to its highly successful soundtrack album, with the singles “Magic” and “Xanadu” both becoming international hits.
Marrying actor Matt Lattanzi in 1984, their daughter Chloe Rose was born in 1986. The couple divorced in 1995. In 2008, Newton-John married Australian eco-entrepreneur John Easterling, and continued to tour globally until her cancer returned.
Eventually, Newton-John hit number one again in 2015 with a different duet. “You Have to Believe,” an electro track performed with daughter Chloe, topped the Billboard Dance Club Song chart. It was a reworking of her 1980 hit “Magic” from the Xanadu soundtrack. “A fun fact is that I met Chloe’s dad on the set of Xanadu, so without that film, Chloe wouldn’t be here. She was the real ‘magic’ that came out of that film!”