Cinderella Girl - TV Times

Her delicate beauty and seemingly fragile diffidence charm audiences. But then she surprises them with her confidence.

Olivia Newton-John appears in The Engelbert Humperdinck Show (right) on Saturday.

Her honesty about herself only adds to the mystique. I just sing and hope, she says. With equal frankness, Humperdinck talks on page 8 about his hopes and ambitions

SHE says she doesn't want to come over as one of those glittering showbusiness ladies. She doesn't. She looks frail - but probably isn't. And before she starts to sing, she probably has a large proportion of the audience on her side in protective sympathy. That nice girl out there all alone.

Judging from the letters I receive, says Olivia Newton-John, people see me either as their daughter or their son's wife. It's very sweet... but there must be many like me around.

When she does sing, audience attitudes seem to change surely that rather unsure girl who stood in the wings has nothing to do with the confident girl out there now?

It's the Cinderella kitchen-to-ballroom transformation all over again and that's how it is with Olivia, off stage and on. She can't explain why. I just want to go on singing the song, she says.

Recently she has been appearing in cabaret at the Savoy, in London. Like every other entertainer who ever played to the dinner-tables, she trots out the lines about cabaret being a challenge, and how one has to win over the audience. How do you do that, Olivia? I just sing and hope, she says. Goodbye to the mystique, or is it? Even if she wasn't pretty, you'd fall for the honesty.

Although born in Cambridge, she was brought up in Australia and returned to Britain seven years ago. At school, she had ambitions to be a vet. This lasted until she started to sing at her brother-in-law's coffee lounge.

She is only 23, but has already had her beatings from showbusiness. It was a big event for a 20-year-old girl who wanted to sing when a big movie producer came along and said that she, and three others, was going to be well, BIG. ...

Olivia became a member of an "instant" pop group with a style like the Monkees. When one is 20 and joining a group that is going to be as big as the Monkees, maybe bigger, "it's like the sky has opened... it's ecstasy."

The group was called Toomorrow, and Harry Saltzman, co-producer of the Bond films, was the backer. When Olivia went for the audition they told her they wanted a girl-next-door with that something extra.

They made records and a film, but the group never took off. Toomorrow never came ...

She was also involved in a public romance. Six years ago, during a summer season at Bournemouth, she met Bruce Welch, formerly guitarist with The Shadows.

Welch's wife named her in the divorce.

Three months later, Welch and Olivia were engaged. The romance lasted four years.

Three days after the break-up was announced, Welch was rushed to hospital suffering from a drug overdose. Olivia travelled with him in the ambulance.

She says she doesn't want to talk about it; that Welch and she are friends and that's all.

She says the idea of marriage scares her. I'd have to be very, very sure be fore I married. My parents marriage broke up when I was a child, and so have the marriages of many of my friends and relatives, she remembers gravely.

But did being a child of a broken marriage knowingly affect her? I don't think so, she says. I like to be surrounded by friends, if that's any reaction. All I think has really happened is that I'm wary of marriage.

Her mother lives in Cambridge and her sister and brother-in-law in London. Her father and brother are in Australia.

Home, for her, is a newly-bought flat in St. John's Wood, London. She says: It's home and an investment. Now I'm shopping around for things to put in it.

I've really been a bit spoilt, having been used to a reasonable amount of money since coming into showbusiness.I'm not conscious of spending it. I know it's wrong, but there you are.

On the subject of the haves and the have-nots, she says she was shocked, while on her way to the Savoy, to have to walk past tramps asleep on pavement grids.

It was a terrible contrast between them and the people I was singing for, she says. I like to think I'll do some thing to help. In a way, you get sheltered from it all in this business.

She would also like to think she wasn't totally caught up by ambition. But she admits: You just go on. I was always ambitious: now I'm a little more so.

Even if Olivia Newton-John weren't pretty, you would fall for her honesty. She says she has been a bit spoilt by showbusiness. And she has always been ambitious. Today, she's a little more so. Now read about Engelbert Humperdinck's career and hopes overleaf.