The world was stunned yesterday after it was learned that British-Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John died at the age of 73, after a three-decade long battle with cancer.
For more than five decades, millions of fans around the world followed the rich career of Newton-John, who will forever be remembered as Sandy from "Grease", but in addition to her iconic character, she starred as a singer whose songs became instant hits.
A rich career.
Olivia Newton-John, in 2017, photo: AFP.
It was the hit "Let Me Be There" that brought Newton-John into consciousness.
The song was so successful that it even earned her her first Grammy Award, for Best Country Performance by a Female Singer.
The album it was named after was also a great success and sold about half a million copies in the US alone. The success of the song led Newton-John to take a rather surprising step the following year - to represent Great Britain at Eurovision. After the audience in the Kingdom chose the song "Long Live Love", Newton-John came in the respectable fourth place in the competition. Two places after her came the band Hive, which represented Israel with "I gave her my life". Both of them, by the way, lost to "Waterloo" by the band that was quite anonymous at the time, Abba.
Newton-John used the momentum well, and soon after released the album "If You Love Me, Let Me Know", which conquered the American charts.
As if that wasn't enough, it included the ballad "I Honestly Love You", which won her two more Grammy Awards and became one of her biggest hits.
She maintained her success with several more albums, but only in 1978 did she become a real superstar, with the release of the movie "Grease", in which she played Sandy, the high school student who falls in love with Danny, played by John Travolta.
The musical film became a huge hit and one of the most beloved films of all time, and its soundtrack, in which Newton-John belted out hits such as "You're The One That I Want" and "Hopelessly Devoted To You", was similarly successful.
With a Golden Globe nomination in hand, "Grease" was Newton-John's high point as an actress.
Three years later, in 1981, "Physical" was released, which was another huge hit in the singer's chain of successes.
Not only did its music video win Newton-John's fourth and final Grammy, the song also received a particularly prestigious title: the most successful hit in the US in the 1980s. That same year, she also received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. How do you say? Breathe.
In 1983, she reunited with John Travolta in the film "Two Of A Kind", but he was unable to come close to recreating the success of "Grease": the reviews killed him and he was not a great commercial success.
However, its soundtrack, which included four of her songs, sold more than a million copies in the US.
From that point on, Newton-John was unable to return to the heights she had previously reached.
She released albums that did not reach the general public and did not really try to raise her film career.
Since being diagnosed with cancer, she has devoted a lot of time to raising awareness of the disease, which eventually overwhelmed her.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us