Olivia Newton-John, who sang among the largest hits of the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s whereas recasting her picture because the virginal woman subsequent door right into a spandex-clad vixen — a change mirrored in miniature by her starring function in “Grease,” some of the standard film musicals of its period — died on Monday at her ranch in Southern California. She was 73.
The loss of life was announced by her husband, John (*73*), who didn’t give a particular trigger in his assertion, although he cited the breast most cancers analysis she had lived with since 1992. In 2017, she introduced that the most cancers had returned and unfold. For years she was a distinguished advocate for most cancers analysis, beginning a basis in her title to assist it and opening a analysis and wellness heart in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. English-born, she grew up in Australia.
Ms. Newton-John amassed No. 1 hits, chart-topping albums and 4 information that bought greater than two million copies every. More than anything, she was likable, even beloved.
In the sooner section of her profession, Ms. Newton-John beguiled listeners with a excessive, supple, vibrato-warmed voice that paired amiably with the type of swooning middle-of-the-road pop that, within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, typically handed for nation music.
Her efficiency on the charts made that blurring clear. She scored seven Top 10 hits on Billboard’s nation chart, two of which turned back-to-back general No. 1 hits in 1974 and ’75. First got here “I Honestly Love You,” an earnest declaration co-written by Peter Allen and Jeff Barry, adopted by “Have You Never Been Mellow,” a feather of a tune written by the producer of a lot of her largest albums, John Farrar.
“I Honestly Love You” additionally received two of the singer’s 4 Grammys, for report of the yr and finest feminine pop vocal efficiency.
The mixture of Ms. Newton-John’s persistently benign music — she was by no means a favourite of critics — and comely however squeaky-clean picture brought on many writers to check her to earlier blond ingénues like Doris Day and Sandra Dee. “Innocent, I’m not,” Ms. Newton-John told Rolling Stone in 1978. “People still seem to see me as the girl next door. Doris Day had four husbands,” she mentioned, but she was nonetheless seen as “the virgin.”
An entry into motion pictures in 1978 aimed to place the singer’s chaste picture behind her, beginning with “Grease.” Her character, Sandy, remodeled from a pigtailed sq. smitten with John Travolta’s bad-boy Danny to a gum-smacking unhealthy woman. “Grease” turned one of many highest grossing film musicals ever, besting even “The Sound of Music.” Its soundtrack was the second best-selling album of the yr, crushed solely by the soundtrack for “Saturday Night Fever,” which additionally starred Mr. Travolta.
The “Grease” soundtrack spawned two No. 1 hits, together with the manically lusty “You’re the One That I Want,” sung by the co-stars. The doo-wop romp “Summer Nights,” which additionally they sang, reached No. 5. (The different No. 1 single from the “Grease” soundtrack was the title tune, sung by Frankie Valli.) A ballad Ms. Newton-John sang alone, “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” earned the movie’s lone Oscar nomination, for finest tune.
Applying the evolution of her “Grease” character to her singing profession, Ms. Newton-John titled her subsequent album “Totally Hot,” and offered herself on the quilt in shoulder-to-toe leather-based. The album, launched at the tip of 1978, went platinum, yielding the rock-oriented “A Little More Love” with the road, “Where did my innocence go?”
The album featured Ms. Newton-John singing in a considerably extra forceful voice. Though her gross sales dipped because the Nineteen Seventies changed into the ’80s, by early within the decade she started probably the most commercially potent interval in her profession, peaking with the only “Physical,” which spent 10 weeks on Billboard’s prime perch. Later, the journal declared it to be the most important tune of the Eighties.
Olivia Newton-John was born on Sept. 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England, the youngest of three youngsters of Brinley and Irene (Born) Newton-John. Her mom was the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. Her Welsh-born father had been an MI5 intelligence officer throughout World War II and afterward served as headmaster at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys.
When Ms. Newton-John was 6, her household immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, the place her father labored as a university professor and administrator. At 14, she shaped her first group, Sol Four, with three ladies from faculty. Her magnificence and confidence quickly earned her solo performances on native radio and TV reveals underneath the title “Lovely Livvy.” On “The Go!! Show” she met the singer Pat Carroll, with whom she would kind a duet, in addition to her eventual producer, Mr. Farrar, who later married Ms. Carroll.
Ms. Newton-John received a neighborhood TV expertise contest whose prize was a visit to Britain. While tarrying there, she recorded her first single, “’Til You Say You’ll Be Mine,” which Decca Records launched in 1966.
After Ms. Carroll moved to London, she and Ms. Newton-John shaped the duet Pat and Olivia, which toured Europe. When Ms. Carroll’s visa expired, forcing her to return to Australia, Ms. Newton-John stayed in London to work solo.
In 1970, she was requested to hitch a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, shaped by the American producer Don Kirshner in an try to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction movie written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both tasks tanked.
“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later instructed The New York Times.
Her debut solo album, “If Not for You,” was launched in 1971, its title observe a canopy of a Bob Dylan tune.
After some duds within the United States, Ms. Newton-John launched the album “Let Me Be There” (1973), which led to a Grammy win for finest feminine nation vocal efficiency.
Two key modifications in pop music boosted her profession that decade: the rise of “soft rock” in response to the tougher genres of the late Sixties, and the mainstreaming — some would say the neutering — of nation music, additionally epitomized by stars like John Denver and Anne Murray.
The latter pattern turned a problem in 1974, after Ms. Newton-John was chosen feminine vocalist of the yr by the Country Music Association over extra conventional stars like Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. Protests led to the formation of the fleeting Association of Country Entertainers. Yet, after Ms. Newton-John recorded her “Don’t Stop Believin’,” album in Nashville in 1976, the friction eased.
The second section of her profession, which started with “Grease,” discovered additional success by way of a duet with Andy Gibb, “I Can’t Help It,” adopted by an try to increase her appearing profession with the 1980 musical movie “Xanadu,” with Gene Kelly. While the film floundered, its soundtrack went double-platinum, boasting hits like “Magic” (which commanded Billboard’s No. 1 spot for 4 weeks) and the title tune, recorded with the Electric Light Orchestra.
A campy Broadway present primarily based on the movie opened in 2007 to some success.
Ms. Newton-John’s smash “Physical” additionally yielded the primary video album to hit the market, with clips for all of the album’s tracks. “Olivia Physical” received the Grammy in 1982 for video of the yr.
She was paired once more with Mr. Travolta within the 1983 film “Two of a Kind,” an try to repeat the success of “Grease.” But the movie disillusioned at the same time as its soundtrack proved standard, particularly the tune “Twist of Fate.”
Ms. Newton-John was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.
By the mid-80s, her profession had cooled. For a number of years she in the reduction of on work to take care of her daughter, Chloe Rose, whom she had together with her husband at the time, the actor Matt Lattanzi. They had met on the set of “Xanadu” and married in 1984; they divorced in 1995.
That similar yr, she met Patrick McDermott, a cameraman whom she dated, on and off, for the following 9 years. In 2005, Mr. McDermott disappeared whereas fishing off the California coast. Three years later, a U.S. Coast Guard investigation mentioned that the proof instructed that Mr. McDermott had been misplaced at sea.
In 2008, Ms. Newton-John married Mr. (*73*), the founding father of the Amazon Herb Company.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Chloe Rose Lattanzi; her sister, Sarah Newton-John; and her brother, Toby.
After studying she had breast most cancers in 1992, Ms. Newton-John turned an ardent advocate for analysis into the illness. Her Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund is devoted to researching plant-based therapies for most cancers, and she opened a most cancers research and wellness facility underneath her title at Austin Hospital, exterior Melbourne.
Despite her personal therapies, she continued to launch albums and tour however didn’t make headway on the charts. And she continued to behave in motion pictures and on tv.
In May 2017, she disclosed that her most cancers had returned and that it had metastasized to her decrease again. She printed a memoir, “Don’t Stop Believin,’” in 2018.
To the tip Ms. Newton-John firmly believed in her audience-friendly strategy to music. “It annoys me when people think because it’s commercial, it’s bad,” she instructed Rolling Stone. “It’s completely opposite. If people like it, that’s what it’s supposed to be.”
