August 13, 2022

Olivia Newton-John

Special Features, Tributes Australian Artists, British Artists

Photo: Juli Balla/Headpress/Redux

Olivia Newton-John (September 26, 1948 – August 8, 2022)

Dame Olivia Newton-John died peacefully at her ranch in Southern California on August 8, 2022, at age 73. Her family’s statement gave no cause, but she had lived publicly with breast cancer for three decades, since her first diagnosis in 1992, with recurrences in 2013 and 2017. She turned that fight into a second life’s work. The Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne, which opened in 2012, carries her name.

Born in Cambridge, England, and raised in Melbourne after her family emigrated in 1954, she was the granddaughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. She cut her first single for Decca in 1966 and spent a disillusioning spell in Toomorrow, a group assembled by producer Don Kirshner, before finding her footing as a solo act. Her first international hit, in 1971, was a cover of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You”. Over the next four years came “Let Me Be There”, the Record of the Year “I Honestly Love You”, “Have You Never Been Mellow” and a fourth-place finish for the United Kingdom at Eurovision in 1974, the year ABBA won with “Waterloo”. Her country-pop success in America even drew grumbling from Nashville purists when she was named the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 1974.

Then came Grease. Playing Sandy opposite John Travolta in 1978, at 28, she became a movie star, and the soundtrack gave her “You’re the One That I Want”, “Summer Nights” and the Oscar-nominated “Hopelessly Devoted to You”. The leather-clad Sandy of the film’s finale carried over onto the cover of Totally Hot later that year, along with a harder, more uptempo sound. In 1980 the film Xanadu flopped, but its soundtrack, split between her songs and the Electric Light Orchestra’s, went double platinum. It gave her the No. 1 “Magic” and the title track with ELO, which we cover in our song post on “Xanadu”. A year later “Physical” spent ten weeks at No. 1 and finished as Billboard’s biggest Hot 100 single of the 1980s. Its video album won her a fourth Grammy and helped pioneer the music video as a format.

Classic rock fans may file her under pop, but her best records were built with rock players, from her longtime producer John Farrar, who played the guitars on “Magic”, to Jeff Lynne and ELO. Her voice had the clarity and control to carry anything from a country ballad to a disco-rock single. She sold more than 100 million records, was made a Dame in 2020, and was remembered with a state memorial in Melbourne in 2023. What lasts, though, is the warmth in that voice.