Her grandfather, German born Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, was one of the key contributors to the development of quantum mechanics and a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein.Īfter Newton-John’s career took off Down Under, she found success in England before embarking on her wildly successful pop career in the early 1970s, hitting the charts first with “Let Me Be There.” She won Best Country Female in 1974, the first of four career Grammys. She’s also being remembered by those in Malibu who appreciated her kindness, warmth, and smiles.Īlthough she was born in England, Newton-John was primarily raised in Australia. The superstar is being remembered the world over for her environmental, humanitarian, animal rights, and breast cancer research activism. 8 at the age of 73, called Malibu home for four decades. Platinum-selling recording artist, actress and activist Olivia Newton-John, who died Aug. In 2008, Newton-John married Australian eco-entrepreneur John Easterling, and continued to tour globally until her cancer returned.She looked like a summer day and sang like a bird on the wing of a summer breeze. Marrying actor Matt Lattanzi in 1984, their daughter Chloe Rose was born in 1986. 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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.
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