Olivia Newton-John, pop singer who discovered stardom with ‘Grease,’ dies at 73

Olivia Newton-John, a British Australian pop star who dominated the popular culture of an period, has died after repeated remedies for most cancers, her husband introduced Monday. She was 73.

“Dame Olivia Newton-John (73) passed away peacefully at her Ranch in Southern California this morning, surrounded by family and friends,” John Easterling, her husband, introduced on her official Facebook web page. “We ask that everyone please respect the family’s privacy during this very difficult time.”

“Olivia has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer. Her healing inspiration and pioneering experience with plant medicine continues with the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, dedicated to researching plant medicine and cancer.”

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Newton-John was one of the recognizable celebrities on the earth. She stole hearts within the 1978 blockbuster “Grease” and dominated the charts with songs just like the 1981 hit “Physical,” which was the No. 1 single of that decade, based on Billboard.

She is credited with promoting greater than 100 million data over the course of a five-decade profession.

In newer years, nonetheless, Newton-John turned finest referred to as an advocate for breast most cancers survivors, being one herself since first her first prognosis in 1992.

“I think, you know, what you think creates your reality. So it’s a decision. You have to make that decision,” she informed the “TODAY” present in March 2019. “You can be a victim, or you can be a winner and enjoy your life.”

By all accounts, Newton-John lived a profitable life.

Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, in 1948 to a father, Brin, who was each a World War II hero with British army intelligence and a professor of German literature, and a mom, Irene, whose personal father, physicist Max Born, would win a Nobel Prize six years later. But from an early age, it appeared she was not destined to comply with into the household enterprise of academia.

After her father took a job at a school in Australia, the household moved to Melbourne when Newton-John was 5. Just just a few years later, she received a expertise contest on one of many nation’s hottest tv exhibits, “Sing, Sing, Sing.” By the time she was 15, she had shaped an all-girl group and later partnered together with her pal Pat Carroll for the pop duo Pat & Olivia.

But it could be as a solo artist, beginning in 1966, that Newton-John would hit her true potential. She broke via on this facet of the Pacific together with her third solo album, “Let Me Be There,” in 1973, with the title observe incomes the singer her first Grammy Award, for finest feminine nation efficiency. Newton-John would rating her first No. 1 and her subsequent two Grammys a yr later with the nation ballad “I Honestly Love You.”

So when “Grease” director Randal Kleiser was trying to forged the position of Sandy, a straight-laced Australian pupil who falls in love with a greaser and finally turns into one herself, he at the very least knew his first alternative may sing, whether or not or not Newton-John may act reverse the red-hot John Travolta, who was recent off “Saturday Night Fever.”

“Olivia Newton-John was our first choice for the part of Sandy, but she had a few concerns,” Kleiser recalled by electronic mail. “She had had a bad experience on an English film and didn’t want to repeat it.”

“(At 29 years old) she wasn’t sure she would look the part of a 17-year-old and wanted to make sure she and John looked like they could be contemporaries,” Kleiser mentioned. “He was a bit younger (at 23). She asked to have a screen test so she could see how she would come across and feel how the chemistry would be between she and John and myself.”

Fortunately, the take a look at labored properly sufficient to persuade her that she may deal with the half.

“She embodied the character in the beginning of the film, and we all hoped she could pull off the sexy vixen at the end,” Kleiser mentioned. “We couldn’t have been more thrilled by the final result.”

That ultimate outcome proved to be a blockbuster.

Her follow-up, the sci-fi, disco musical “Xanadu,” did not fare almost as properly.

At least one thing good got here of that position: She married co-star Matt Lattanzi in 1984. Two years later, the couple welcomed a daughter, Chloe Rose. But they separated after 11 years of marriage, in 1995.

Newton-John appeared to surrender on Hollywood after the 1983 fantasy romance “Two of a Kind” reunited her on display with Travolta, nevertheless it had not one of the magic their final collaboration did.

The movie disappointment did not matter a lot: In the early ’80s, Newton-John was busy having loads of success within the music enterprise. She notched her greatest hit with the tune “Physical” in November 1981. Actually, it was your entire trade’s greatest hit of that decade, based on a Billboard rating, and held its high spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 consecutive weeks.

Movies and music took an eventual backseat to motherhood and medical points.

Newton-John started to turn out to be an advocate for most cancers analysis in 1991, after the tragic dying of her finest pal’s daughter from a uncommon childhood type of the illness. But it turned an much more private trigger a yr later, when she was recognized with breast most cancers for the primary time.

After going into remission, most cancers returned two extra occasions, in 2013 and 2017.

Amid a largely storybook life got here a plot twist solely barely extra plausible than “Xanadu”: Tragedy appeared to strike when her boyfriend of 9 years, Patrick McDermott, then 48, went lacking and was presumed lifeless after failing to return from a fishing journey off the coast of California in 2005. But his ultimate destiny is shrouded in thriller after a non-public investigator employed by NBC’s “Dateline” claimed to have discovered proof that McDermott faked his personal dying to evade money owed and begin a brand new life in Mexico.

“I mean it’s human to wonder. But you know … those are the things in life you have to accept and let go,” Newton-John informed Australia’s model of “60 Minutes” in 2016.

By that point, Newton-John had certainly let go and moved on, marrying American businessman John Easterling in an Incan ceremony on a mountaintop outdoors of Peru in 2008. The singer has credited her husband, who based Amazon Herb Company, purveyors of botanical dietary supplements, with serving to flip her on to medical marijuana as a therapy for most cancers.

Living with the illness, she repeatedly mentioned, had given her perspective.

“We’re all going to die. That’s probably the hardest thing to accept as a human being,” Newton-John informed “TODAY” in March 2019. “I’m 70 and I’ve had the most amazing life, and I have extra time. So whatever that is, I’m grateful for it.”