Her father, a German translator from Wales, was the headmaster of King’s College when she was a child. Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, in 1948 to a pair of intellectuals, Brinley Newton-John and Irene Helene Born. Newton-John, as Sandy, and John Travolta, as Danny, dancing in the 1978 film “Grease.” Photograph from Paramount Pictures / Alamy There was little real danger in her image, but a lot of alluring sparkle she made people feel as if, with a little red lipstick and a pair of stilettos, they, too, could strut their way into a brand-new personality, if only for a moment of smoldering glory. But it all seemed a bit like playacting, as if Newton-John was the girl next door dressed up as the Devil just for Halloween. The record went platinum around the same time as the “Grease” soundtrack did, making Newton-John one of the most bankable recording artists of the time. Just after “Grease” débuted, Newton-John posed for the cover of her tenth studio album, “Totally Hot,” in head-to-toe black leather, staring diffidently at the camera. What gave Newton-John’s later career a peculiar frisson was that she never really dropped her Sandy #1 congeniality, even as she swerved into Sandy #2 territory. Her early album covers feature portraits of a very blond Newton-John in various pastoral settings, whether a field of wildflowers or a pine forest or a sparkling patch of water. Newton-John started out her career as a teen singing star in the sixties in Australia, where she established her perky Sandy #1 image. (The title of her memoir comes not from Journey’s 1981 hit “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” but from her own studio album of the same name, from 1976.) Yet she was something of an aesthetic risk-taker in her most popular films, playing not only “Grease” ’s cigarette-crushing siren but also the roller-skating Greek muse Terpsichore in the 1980 disco epic “Xanadu,” a cult classic that has been maligned and reclaimed so many times that it has more or less passed into legend. Newton-John, who died on Monday, at seventy-three years old, after a decades-long battle with breast cancer, was breezy and winsome as a young pop singer, a sunny Breck girl with feathered hair and a twinkly, soothing timbre. “Sandy #2 was deliciously wild, and there was a great buildup of excitement inside me to finally bring her to life.” This dichotomy-a pert good girl who longs to be bad, a cheeky bad girl trying her hardest to be good-echoed throughout Newton-John’s long career as an actress and singer. “Number two smoked, wore black leather and high heels, and wrapped her legs around a boy as he danced her through the grounds of the high school,” Newton-John writes. In Olivia Newton-John’s 2018 memoir, “ Don’t Stop Believin’,” she describes working on the movie “Grease” as “a tale of two Sandys.” There was “Sandy #1”-the chorus girl in pink crinolines who always makes curfew and never kisses and tells-and “Sandy #2,” the lip-licking vixen in spandex pants so tight that Newton-John had to be sewn into them for the film’s final scene.
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