Australian refuge - Here Olivia forgets her troubles
Translation from Dutch:
‘Grease’ is still ‘the word’; young and old know Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson from Rydell High. However no matter how many productions are still in theaters, there is only one real Sandy, and that is Olivia Newton-John, who, together with John Travolta, turned the film into a mega-hit in 1978.
The public is still hopelessly devoted to Olivia. PRIVÉ was given an exclusive look inside the Gaia Resort and Spa, of which she is the owner and where she can find herself. For the life of the successful star has been marked by dramas…
By Josephine Major. Photos RBP
Gaia Resort and Spa seems like a piece of heaven on earth; nature is vast, the mountains are green, and the climate is subtropical.
For Olivia Newton-John, who bought this little paradise in 2004, this is the place where body and soul can find balance again. The resort has twenty rooms and suites, all decorated in earth tones. The vegetables and herbs used in the meals all come from the organic gardens of Gaia (Mother Earth). You can relax by the pool, enjoy various massages, have beauty and detox treatments, practice yoga, or play tennis.
Upon departure, every guest plants a tree to contribute to nature.
Olivia remains a household name for many. Around 1980, her face hung in the sleep of many a teenager; boys were crazy about her, and girls wanted to look like her. With songs like If you Love me Let Me Know and I honestly love you, she already scored huge hits.
With her role as the girl Sandy Olsson in Grease, she became a worldwide mega-star. You’re the One That I Want and Summer Nights topped the charts everywhere, and she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Grease.
Breast cancer
Olivia’s life has known many highs, but also enormous lows.
She was born on September 26, 1948, in Cambridge, Britain, as the granddaughter of Max Born, Nobel Prize winner in Physics. When she was five, she moved to Australia, only to return to England in the 1960s. She achieved success there as a singer and appeared every week in the Cliff Richard show.
In 1974, she represented Great Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest. Shortly afterwards, she sought her fortune in America and found it.
She won four Grammy Awards, had five number one hits, and, of course, great success with the film Grease.
In 1984, at the height of her fame, she married Matt Lattanzi, with whom she had daughter Chloe Rose in 1986. In 1992, Olivia received terrible news. In the same weekend that her father passed away, she learned that she had breast cancer. She was 44 years old at the time. She had hardly any time to process her father’s death, as she had to undergo surgery immediately and then began chemotherapy.
She also sought the help of alternative medicine. ‘I had a kind of treatment where the East and the West met,’ she later said.
Yoga, meditation, and homeopathy gave her, by her own account, the ‘inner strength to make all negative energy disappear from the body and let positive energy enter.’
After a year, she turned out to be cancer-free, and she is still. In the same year that she fought her illness, Olivia released the album Gaia, featuring self-written songs about her experiences and the self-trust one must have to overcome the disease. Later, she gave the resort, which has become her sanctuary, the same name.
Mysterious disappearance
Olivia’s marriage to Matt Lattanzi lasted twelve years. Just a year after the divorce, she was living with cameraman Patrick McDermott, with whom she was blissfully happy. Until Olivia had to deal with a new tragedy in 2005. On June 30 of that year, Patrick boarded the Freedom in San Pedro for a two-day fishing trip along the coast of California.
Olivia was staying at the Gaia Resort at the time. When Patrick failed to show up for a family outing a week later, the alarm was raised. Olivia’s lover had disappeared without a trace. Investigators found his car in the port of San Pedro, and some of his personal belongings — such as money, a passport, and credit cards — were found on board the ship. Did he fall overboard, or did he commit suicide?
However, others say they saw him walk off the ship. The Los Angeles police and Coast Guard are baffled. Olivia was completely devastated and shut herself off from the outside world on Gaia. Although the police continued searching for McDermott, Olivia hired private investigators herself to find out what had happened to her loved one. Slowly, more and more facts emerged indicating that Patrick was responsible for his own disappearance, had staged the scene.
Shortly before the fishing trip, he had filed for bankruptcy because the judge had ordered him to pay arrears in alimony. Before he met Olivia, he had been married for fifteen months and had a son, CHANCE, from this marriage. After the divorce, he was supposed to pay eight hundred dollars a month, but he never did.
And it is increasingly beginning to look like he did indeed stage his disappearance himself. Six months ago, the Australian daily newspaper The Daily Telegraph launched an investigation. They found witnesses, including a bar owner, who claim to have seen McDermott alive and well on the island of the Baja Peninsula, which belongs to Mexico.
It was a terrible blow for Olivia, but she finds her inner peace at her Gaia Resort, where she welcomes like-minded people. In addition, she continues to dedicate herself to the fight against cancer.