Olivia Blooming After Breast Cancer - You

Olivia’s Earthly Powers

By Nancy Mills

Olivia Newton-John scurries around her enormous wood-panelled Malibu kitchen making tea. We don’t have real milk, she apologises, just soy milk. No dairy here.

Olivia has changed her life — in her view, for the better - after a two-and-a-half-year battle against breast cancer. It was diagnosed on 3 July 1992, the same day her father died of cancer. Soon after that she had a mastectomy, followed by eight months of chemotherapy.

The experience frightened and matured her. She took two years off to recuperate, and then put her experience to work on a new album, Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, to be released later this year.

Explaining the title of the album, Olivia says, Gaia is the spirit of Mother Earth. I believe the planet is a living, breathing organism, and we’re part of her. This album is very much just me. I wrote it all myself and there are several songs I’m really proud of, including Not Gonna Give ln To It, which l wrote while going through chemotherapy.

Having cancer changed me in lots of ways that are beneficial, she says. I’m not a fearful person any more. Before, I may have been fearful about a lot of things, especially in human relationships. I was afraid of expressing myself. But when you go through this, you become unafraid because you've faced the worst. It's not what happens to you in life, it’s how you cope and how you move on.

Olivia's new directness is refreshing to hear. Just four years ago she spoke hesitantly in interviews, reluctant to reveal anything personal. Her reserve gave her a distant, even icy demeanour.

Now she carries her tea out on to the sun deck, where she often watches dolphins cavorting in the Pacific Ocean, and swings her bare legs up on the table so they can get some sun. Dressed in white shorts and a white hooded sweatshirt, Olivia, 46, could almost be the fresh-faced teenager she portrayed in Grease. Only the lines that form on her forehead when she's thinking hint at her experiences.

Throughout her ordeal, though, she has maintained a positive outlook. It’s important to have a fighting instinct, she says. I did all the treatments: chemotherapy, homoeopathy - which really helped me through the chemotherapy - acupuncture, yoga and meditation. You’ve got to make care of all parts of yourself, not just your body. Mental attitude is the key.

After her treatment Olivia went to Australia to recuperate. We have a small farm there, she says, where she was able to relax.

The family’s new Malibu home, on the other hand, is more like a modern palace. She moved here in 1993 with her husband, American actor Matt Lattanzi, and their nine-year-old daughter, Chloe, after 18 years of living in the Malibu hills. She wanted to be close enough to the ocean to hear the sound of waves in every room.

Because cancer patients are not considered cured until five years have passed since treatment started, Olivia says she lives, for the moment. The only schedule I have now is getting Chloe to school in the morning. For the past ten days, I really haven’t left this place, except for a doctor's appointment. I got pretty worn out from filming [she recently completed a film for American television, A Christmas Romance, co-starring Chloe in her film debut]. We shot it in 20 days, and l haven’t quite recovered.

When Olivia was cast in her first film, Grease, in 1978, she had no acting experience, although she was a very successful pop singer. After that, she made two more feature films, Xanadu in 1980 and Two of A Kind in 1983. I'd like to make another feature, she says.

But What I’d really like is to get my new album out to other women who’ve been through breast cancer. I had a great experience in Australia. I was at a health spa and a woman came up to me and said, I was watching you on television one day and you looked right in the lens and said, If there are any women out there who are suspicious about a lump, don’t wait. Go check it out. I had this lump for ages, and I was too scared to go. But because you told me to go I went. I did have breast cancer, and if I'd waited any longer it would have been too late...”

Olivia was deeply moved by that conversation. Breast cancer is not a pleasant experience, but you can gain so much if you come through the other side.