I'm Going To Get Physical

OLIVIA Newton-John is feeling – and looking – good for a woman who started the year reading reports of her own death. The British-born singer and film star spoke on Australian TV in September about her stage four breast cancer which had spread to her spine. But fans went into premature mourning.

Rumours spread that she was on her deathbed or, worse, already dead. She had to begin 2019 with a New Year message on social media to prove she was very much alive.

I made a video to dismiss all that and stop it in its tracks, Olivia says. It was getting out of hand and it was alarming my family and friends in other parts of the world who weren’t tuned in to what was going on.

Two years after sharing her diagnosis, Olivia, who made became a worldwide star opposite John Travolta in the 1978 movie Grease, says she is living with cancer, not about to die from it.

I’m healing and I’m feeling really good, Olivia adds. My markers are down, my blood work is good, I have energy, I’m sleeping.

I don’t listen to statistics and ‘stage four’ and all that, I put that out of my mind. I tell people that once you do that, you buy into all that and then it’s kind of hard to stay positive. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992 and underwent a mastectomy. She recently revealed that, when it reappeared 21 years later, she kept it a secret. It was 2013, the year her older sister, Rona Newton-John, died from brain cancer.

It all happened at the same time and I didn’t want it stirring everything up and have all that attention over it, she says. I was dealing with grief as it was and just wanted to do it on my own. It was just all too much to be then talking about that as well.

Olivia also tried to keep her third diagnosis in 2017 private but news leaked out when she postponed a tour, the rumour mill went into overdrive and she made a statement that her breast cancer had spread to the sacrum (a bone in the lower back).

Her new autobiography, Don’t Stop Believin’, charts both her showbiz career as a four-time Grammy Award winner and her relentless refusal to give up on her health.

Key to that is medicinal cannabis which is legal in California, where she lives. In 2008 she married John Easterling, an expert in plants of the Amazon. She calls him her medicine man who makes the cannabis tincture she swears by I weaned myself off morphine with the cannabis, Olivia says.

I was determined I was not going to remain on opiates. Cannabis addresses pain and also, we believe, death of the cancer cell.

Olivia was born in Cambridge – her family left England and moved Down Under when she was five. When she was first asked to put her name to a new cancer hospital in Melbourne, where she grew up, she had only one condition: a hopeful name. She says: I don’t want people just reading ‘cancer’ up there. ‘Cancer’ and ‘wellness’ gives you hope when you read that on the side of the building. The Olivia Newton-john Cancer Wellness and Research Centre in Melbourne opened in 2012 and pioneers both cutting edge medicine and holistic therapies. Medics collaborate with researchers around the world. But that takes money.

Which is why Olivia is selling her show and movie costumes at a Beverly Hills auction in November – including the 1950s sharkskin trousers she wore as Sandy in the Grease finale.

Olivia says: Somebody said to me, ‘You realise how important the jacket and pants are?’ And I hadn’t really thought about it. I gave away the red shoes about 20 years ago. I never thought that 40 years later people would be interested in them.

She had only intended to auction the skin-tight vintage pants (she famously had to be sewn into them for filming) and the jacket she wore but soon raided storage for other clothes from her long career. They include costumes from her Vegas shows and the slinky outfit she wore in her Physical video of 1981.

Olivia showed how well she was by flying to County Kildare in Ireland – to see the collection on display at the Museum Of Style Icons (running until August 18).

It was a lovely experience to see fans had come from all over Europe and other parts of the world to see the outfits, she says.

With collectors and museums already vying to own the memorabilia, she has high hopes of filling her hospital coffers. I have a bottom line of a million dollars for each, she says. That’s my dream, that people bid up to that and that would help my centre research programmes greatly so I’d be thrilled.

Olivia, who was having hit records from the early Seventies and who represented the UK in Eurovision 1974 with Long Live Love, comes from a family of can-do people. Her mother Irene was the daughter of Max Born, a Nobel Prize-winning German physicist and close friend of Albert Einstein. Her father Professor Brin Newton-John was a Welsh Royal Air Force intelligence officer and a codebreaker at Bletchley Park in the Second World War.

Olivia’s mission is arguably the most ambitious of all. She wants to see a cure for cancer in her lifetime. As the iconic clothes are showcased around the world ahead of the auction, Olivia is preparing for her annual fundraising Wellness Walk & Research Run in Melbourne in October. She vows she will take part, despite being in so much pain at last year’s event that she ended up bedridden in her own hospital.

The secondary cancer had caused agony. But even this she sees as a gift because it allowed her to experience care as a patient, not just a celebrity patron. I was hiding because I didn’t want anyone to know I was there. I didn’t want to make a fuss, I didn’t want any extra attention, she says. So I would walk around on my walker with a ski hat on and a pair of sunglasses. Just shuffle around the ward and no one knew it was me.

It meant she spent her 70th birthday last September propped up in bed after radiation treatment, with just close family and friends. I thought, I'll have a party in England, I’ll have a party in Australia and I’ll have a party in America!’ and it was nothing like that, she says. But it was an unforgettable birthday.

She is determined to be well enough to line up for her fundraiser. I feel fantastic, Olivia says. I even played golf in Ireland. You can walk for me in other countries and raise money that way. That would be wonderful.

Money from the walk and auction will help battle the disease that has stalked Olivia - but not beaten her - for almost 30 years . And we will find the cure, she says. I really believe that.