The real Olivia Newton-John is kept hidden behind an entertaining facade
Olivia Newton-John bristles at the suggestion that she is the perfect TV creature: pretty and vacuous.
“You say you’ve never seen a story on me where I’ve said anything beyond the superficial level. Well, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything else. It means I just refuse to talk about it. It seems I spend my life talking about myself and the really special things, the private me, I choose not to talk about.”
“I keep a very special, low profile. I don’t go to that many big functions, and I stay with the same boyfriend I’ve been with, and we keep it private. I’ll talk about Olivia Newton-John the performer,” she says.
Olivia Newton-John’s idea of talking about Olivia Newton-John the performer is to remind the interviewer to remind the reader of upcoming performances. It doesn’t go far beyond that.
When asked how she explains her considerable success with rock, pop and country audiences, she says: “Why do people like certain things? I don’t know. Neither do the critics, that’s for sure. It was not instant, you know, my success”
“I suppose it was that I appealed to both country fans and pop fans. I was doing the right music at the right time. I was creating something people liked. Not that I wrote the songs, though I am writing some now going to be recognizable at this point. But I was just a performer the audience found pleasant, none of which are
“And after all, the audience’s opinion is the only one that counts, isn’t it?” she adds.
“You mentioned the reaction to the sneak preview of my film, ‘Grease,” suggesting it didn’t go very well. Well, I didn’t see any of that. What I saw was an audience that loved it. That’s the reaction I saw. And I don’t care what the others say.”
The terrific-looking blonde from Australia easily played the high schooler in “Grease,” even though estimates put her age at between 29 and 31.
Some of her harsher critics say her music crosses over into several audiences because it has no style of its own. Olivia says, however, that the strongest influences on her singing style and music were Dionne Warwick, the Beatles, Ray Charles and Joan Baez.
“I certainly think there’s depth there, don’t you? There’s a lot of energy, too, I put a lot into my performances, especially live ones. A lot happens before an artist steps on stage that people don’t appreciate.”
There was the story making the rounds last year that there was so much nervous energy rattling around inside Olivia Newton-John, the performer, that on occasion she would forget lines onstage and tighten up. It was an appealing story, one that suggested there was something beneath the icy attractiveness.
“That was all overblown,” she counters. “Every performer has a case of nerves now and then. I have become much more confident and have none of that at all now, and it never was what the stories made it out to be an inner battle.”
“Once you get on stage, if you’re a professional, you just do what it is you do. And you keep on doing it as long as the audience likes it.”
“I don’t worry about falling out of favor with the audience. I’m not interested in how I grow old or growing old gracefully. If they still want me 10 years from now, fine. I intend to grow as an artist as I grow in years. It’s my own career, and I suspect it will take different turns.”
She does not think it was a step backward to play the 18-year-old in “Grease.” She says playing opposite John Travolta in the movie version of the play was “exciting, and the people were all so young and there was incredible energy, which I enjoyed plugging into. They were all young people around me.”
By Chris Stoehr, Knight-Ridder News Service
Photo cpation: Singer Olivia Newton-John poses with her new filly 'Julia' at her. Malibu, Calif, home.