my year of loss and love
Olivia Newton-John pays a touching tribute to her much-loved mother, Irene, in this intimate interview with Michael Sheather.
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN’S VOICE IS SOFT and delicate. She is speaking about the past year of her life, a time which has been uplifting and fulfilling, and abundant with promise, but also tinged with sadness and a deep sense of loss.
It’s a year during which her 18-year-old daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, has been readying herself for her first album and the launch of her singing career, following in the footsteps of her famous mother, a year in which Olivia has taken on a new and broader role as a high-profile spokeswoman in the fight against breast cancer, and a year that witnessed the stock market revival of her Koala Blue business brand as an international wine label.
It is also a year in which Olivia endured the death of her 89-year-old mother, Irene, last September, after a long illness.
Today, the pain and grief are receding, replaced by the acceptance and resilience that are the hallmarks of Olivia’s personality. She speaks freely and lovingly about Irene, a woman who was the greatest influence on her life as mother, adviser, one-time manager, confidante and friend.
“There have been a lot of wonderful things in my life during the past year, and some sad things,” says Olivia, 55. “The hardest was the loss of my mum. She was a wonderful, warm and beautiful woman, whom I loved very much. It’s a very difficult thing to lose your mother, but I was very fortunate in that I was able to be with her at the end. It was painful and difficult, but she had everyone she loved around her and she had a very graceful exit.”
Irene, pronounced Iraina, had been a tower of strength throughout Olivia’s life, and in many ways an inspiration. There is a quiet strength about Olivia Newton-John. She’s understated, unaffected by her success - almost to the point of shyness.
Yet there’s a veiled shaft of steel somewhere in her psyche that has allowed her to endure the most tragic episodes of her life-her battle with breast cancer, the end of her marriage to actor and dancer Matt Lattanzi with poise and dignity. That, she says, is one of many attributes inherited from Irene.
“She was an incredibly strong woman and I would like to think that I take at least a little of that strength from her,” says Olivia. “She was also very funny and very talented, and I’m grateful that I got to learn so much from her.”
“I have inherited some of those things from her, for sure. It’s hard to talk about yourself in this way, but I am sure that, like many women, I was greatly affected by the role model my mother held out for me. She was very hard working and I think she instilled that in me, too. She was also a very positive woman, always taking the initiative, being passionate about the things she believed in.”
“I always respected and admired that about Mum and I think that is part of the reason I have been able to speak out about issues in my own life, such as the breast cancer and the environment.”
Indeed, Olivia’s own passion for the environment she is an outspoken critic of old-growth logging and a long-time supporter of Planet Ark, which promotes the planting of trees and recycling-began when she was growing up in Melbourne.
“As a child, I can always remember my mum being extremely conscious of the environment. I think that is where my passion for it springs from,” she says. “My mother was very environmentally aware long before it was fashionable to be so. She was conscious of not throwing away the slightest thing that might have a use and always kept string or the smallest piece of paper. It was her way of trying to alleviate some of the burden on the environment.”
“She believed very strongly in nature and that we shouldn’t hurt the world that we were living in. In that way, she was very much ahead of her time. She was always saying that we shouldn’t waste anything because you never know when we might run out. She was always conscientious about that, and she was never a wasteful person.”
Olivia says that Irene had been ill for some time before her death. She had battled osteoporosis, a condition that left. her with brittle bones, during the past few years. Olivia spent six months in Australia in 2002, mainly to be with her mother after she broke her hip in a fall.
"It's a very difficult thing to lose your mother but I was very fortunate in that I was able to be with her at the end... she had a very graceful exit."
“She was ill off and on for quite a while,” recalls Olivia. “And she was ageing. She was still an active and vital woman, but she was in her late 80s. She lived through World War II and you had to be very careful because there wasn’t a lot of food around. That was part of the reason that her bones were so bad, because she didn’t get the full range of foods that she needed when she was young, such as dairy products with enough calcium, and all the foods that we take for granted these days.”
“She was always very active and she would write a lot of letters to the local council and to the state government, and in her community she was always trying to make changes.”
“I have a great love of wildlife and trees and, not long before she died, they were cutting down the trees in her street and she was absolutely devastated. She called me and said she was furious and was writing letters to the council.”
“She loved nature. I love nature, and I learned that from her. That’s a lovely legacy for a mother to leave her child.”
There are many other reasons why Olivia feels grateful to her mother. It was Irene who stepped in to guide and manage her daughter’s fledgling career when Olivia was still a schoolgirl.
Olivia was born, the youngest of three children, in Cambridge, England, in 1948.
Her father, Bryn Newton-John, was an academic of Welsh descent who had once considered a career as an opera singer, and taught German at King’s College, Cambridge. Her mother’s father was the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Max Born, who was part of the scientific team that helped split the atom and a close friend of Albert Einstein.
The family moved to Australia in 1953, when her father was appointed master of Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Her parents separated in the late ’50s, her father moving to Adelaide to take up another academic position, her mother remaining in Melbourne.
By the age of 14. Olivia had already launched herself into her singing career. She formed a singing group with three friends and regularly performed in jazz clubs and coffee shops around Melbourne.
She started performing in the evenings at a coffee shop called Brummel’s in inner Melbourne, that was run by her brother-in-law, Brian Goldsmith, the husband of Olivia’s older sister, Rona.
“I’d go down to watch some of the performers play and sing. I don’t think Mum was all that keen on me being there, but because Brian was running the place, she thought I’d be okay,” she says.
“There was a guitar player there, Hans George, and I started getting up with him to do some harmonies. Not long after, three friends and I started a singing group and we used to play some of the jazz clubs around town. I also began appearing on TV shows like Sunny Side Up and The Gong Show, and a few others, and people would call my mother to ask if I was being managed. Evie Hayes, who was a very prominent professional singer in those days, called my mother a few times to see if she could manage me, but Mum decided that she would look after me, instead. I guess she was just looking out for me. She was very conscientious. I was always very proud to tell everyone that she was my manager. She even bought me my first guitar.”
Olivia’s big break came when she appeared in a talent quest on Johnny O’Keefe’s popular TV show, Sing, Sing, Sing, in 1964. She won, and first prize was a trip to England. She was 16. For the next year, she agonised over which path she would follow: whether to stay in Australia or head to England. In the end, it was Irene’s influence and determination that made the difference.
“One of the conditions of the prize was that I had to take the trip within the year and I honestly didn’t want to go,” says Olivia. “I had a boyfriend, Ian Turpie, in Australia whom I wanted to be with. But my mother was adamant that I should go to England. She was the one who pushed me and she almost had to drag me by the hair. I always thanked her afterwards, but I didn’t thank her at the time. I was horrible to her. Even after we got to England, I wanted to go back to Australia, but she made me stay there to broaden my horizons. I was so young and I was furious at the time, but she was right. I think at the back of her mind she was worried that I was too young to be so seriously involved with someone. So that was another example of the important influence she had on me.”
Irene’s wish was for Olivia to study acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, however, “I was only really interested in following my music.”
Recounting these stories about her beginnings in show business resonates powerfully for Olivia. She can see Irene’s strength and independence of spirit in her own daughter, Chloe, whose first album will be released later this year. And Olivia, much like Irene, is doing everything that a mother can do to help her daughter achieve her dream.
“I try to let Chloe steer her own ship,” Olivia says. “She needs to do that. She has her own management and makes her own decisions, but I try to keep an overview. I try to offer advice without overstepping the boundaries.”
“I understand what it must be like to be my daughter and to be in that position, following her mother into the same career, but she’s pretty savvy.”
“Chloe is still growing and she has only just found her stride as a performer. She has been writing for a long time and recording different songs for a long time. Now, she is finally finding her niche.”
“Her voice is very rich, she has a lot of depth and soul in it. And that is a good thing, because I don’t think that I would like to be growing up as a teenager, starting out in an industry like this and always being compared to my mother.”
“She has been around the business since she was born. And she knows the direction she wants to take and the look she wants. She’s a very intelligent young woman with a strong sense of her music and where she is going.”
Olivia knows her own route ahead, too, completing another tour in the US. She’s also intimately involved in the launch of a breast cancer test kit - the Liv Kit-which is currently available in the US and will soon be available in Australia.
“It’s very exciting,” she says. “We are preparing to launch the kit a little later in the year. It’s a wonderful thing, that is going to help women to detect lumps in their breasts. We are hoping that this device will become something women will do as often as brushing their teeth, something they will use with regularity. It’s like a personal health check.”
She is acutely aware of the figurehead role she has assumed for some women in the fight against breast cancer. As a high-profile survivor-she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992 and beat it after a partial mastectomy-she believes she has a responsibility to share her experiences.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to talk about the cancer, but today, 12 years down the track, I have come to realise that I can help other women by talking about what I went through.”
“I was delighted when I was asked about being involved with the kit. I still get calls from people who have a friend who has breast cancer, asking if I can talk to them. It’s amazing, when you are going through it, how beneficial it can be to talk to someone who has travelled the same road. It helps give people a vision of what the future can be like.”
The future is something that figures heavily in any conversation with Olivia.
She has a full life. Koala Blue, the company which she founded with close friend Pat Farrar, and which collapsed with massive debts in 1991, is back in the marketplace with a range of Australian wines that are doing well both at home and in the US. There are plans to expand the product range to include chocolates and mineral water. There is also a new album in the planning stages.
“I will be recording later this year. I have decided that I want to do one more album,” she says. “It may be my last, I don’t know. And I want to take some time off later in the year so I can be around for Chloe and the launch of her album. It’s an important part of her life and I want to be there for her.”
Most of all, Olivia is determined to wring the last drop of enjoyment from every moment. It’s a lesson that began when her breast cancer forced her to face her own mortality, a lesson that was reinforced with Irene’s death.
“No one escapes loss encroaching on their life. That is part of their journey,” she says. “And you know what? Instead of making me unhappy, it made me want to seize the day.
“It makes you appreciate the moments you have with each other, because life is so fleeting. When you watch someone you love go, you realise how transient it all is, and how important it is to appreciate the moment. That was something my mother gave to me, that ability to revel in life for its own sake, so I am grateful to her for that, too.”
Photos: Michelle Day