By Erin Free
The sad, sad passing of Olivia Newton-John has been a real gut-punch in Australia, with the beloved singer, advocate, and actress one of our brightest shining beacons of the entertainment industry. While her warmth of spirit and great gifts as a singer have been duly and appropriately celebrated in the days since her passing, we’d like to take a look at Olivia Newton-John’s cinematic output. Her two biggest film roles have, of course, been figuring heavily in the TV and online tributes, and 1978’s Grease and 1980’s Xanadu are certainly amongst the late star’s key creative achievements. While well-known too for her cheesy Christmas-themed telemovies, Olivia Newton-John also has a few spicier and far less well recognised entries on her big screen resume.
Olivia Newton-John’s first film appearance came as a sunny teen in the 1965 family film Funny Things Happen Down Under, in which a group of kids discover a new method of selling coloured wool while trying to raise money to save their clubhouse. It’s a cute, funny little flick, and Olivia Newton John’s wholesome but feisty persona gets its first solid workout in this characteristic effort from 1960s kids film and TV specialist Joe McCormick. Unsurprisingly in the intervening years since its release, Funny Things Happen Down Under has been repackaged in various forms to highlight the involvement of Olivia Newton-John. According to FilmInk’s Stephen Vagg (in his excellent article “Australian Singers Turned Actors”), ONJ “looks lovely and sings a few tunes, outshining her co-star, pop star Ian Turpie. Both Livvy and Turps would go on to bigger and better things but Funny Things is worth seeing, even if only for the campest dancing shearers in cinematic history.”
Olivia Newton-John’s next film was decidedly more adult in nature…though not that adult. An oddball big screen affair cooked up by renowned music producer and manager Don Kirshner and James Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman, 1970’s Toomorrow continued a consistent theme of Kirshner’s work. As he had with TV’s The Monkees and The Archies, the music industry power player here once again sought to manufacture a rock band via the screen. Olivia Newton-John charmingly fronts an assembled pop group in a bizarre and very much of-its-time film which involves an alien living on earth who has a strange response to the group’s music. Barely released and actively suppressed by Don Kirshner for his entire life (it saw a DVD release upon his death in 2011), Toomorrow is disdained as a major misfire but remains a true curiosity on ONJ’s resume. Via the exhaustive fan website Only Olivia, the actress/singer later came to terms with the disastrous Toomorrow, happily laughing it off as “a cult sci-fi movie.”
Olivia Newton-John’s next film recharged her film career like a bolt of, well, greased lighting. 1978’s much loved Grease is now a kitsch classic, as famous for its sugary, addictive songs as it is for the atomic chemistry that burned between Olivia Newton-John and her leading man John Travolta. Also forming a life-long friendship, the sparks that the pair inspire in the wonderful Grease burn hot and bright in the film, driving it to delirious levels of pure entertainment. One thing rarely mentioned about Grease is the fact that it’s a strange anomaly; though made in the funky, freewheeling seventies, it espouses the moral rigour of the fifties, and stands as a sunny, engaging romp, full of drag racing, teen gangs and gleaming romance. It’s a double-downed slice of nostalgia, for viewers raised in both the 1970s and 1950s. The film is amongst the most truly beloved of all time, and ONJ’s performance as good girl Sandy is an absolute joy to behold. “I knew she was perfect for conservative Sandy,” Grease director Randall Kleiser told The Sydney Morning Herald. “But I was privately worried that she wouldn’t be able to pull the transformation off. But of course, I didn’t need to worry.”
While Grease was a massive, monster, transformative smash hit, Olivia Newton-John’s next effort was the exact opposite. Excoriated by critics and a major box office flop, 1980’s highly unusual Xanadu has thankfully undergone something of a reappraisal in recent years, with Olivia Newton-John’s fans really embracing the kitsch wonders of this mythology-inspired roller-skating musical co-starring dance legend Gene Kelly and Michael Beck, fresh off his breakout turn in 1979’s classic The Warriors. Featuring terrific music produced by ELO’s Jeff Lynne (including the stone-cold-classic title track, and the absolute belter “Magic”) and a truly inspired story involving ONJ’s Greek mythology muse Terpsichore bewitching Beck’s struggling artist, Xanadu climaxes with an extraordinary dance sequence like no other, and is a truly underrated and highly original oddball musical of the 1980s.
“I’m so happy with Grease and Xanadu, particularly because of the music in both films,” Olivia Newton-John once said. “I still can’t believe I danced with Gene Kelly. How lucky am I that I’ve been in movies where I’ve danced with two of the greatest dancers of all time – with Gene Kelly and John Travolta.”
Though they opted not to reunite for Grease 2 (their shoes were very insubstantially filled by Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield in this ultimately misguided sequel), Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta did get back together for 1983’s Two Of A Kind, which turned out to be a major misfire for the duo. Written and directed by John Herzfeld (2 Days In The Valley, 15 Minutes), this plodding romantic comedy features Travolta as a failed inventor and ONJ as a sneaky bank teller, both of whom become caught up in a trial from God himself to test whether humankind deserves to continue. Though sparks still fly between the pair in the film (and ONJ had some hits on the soundtrack), Two Of A Kind really just made people think about how much they would have preferred to see Oliva and John in a sequel to Grease instead.
After two Christmas TV flicks (A Mom For Christmas, A Christmas Romance), ONJ reunited with Grease director Randal Kleiser for 1996’s It’s My Party, a deeply personal project for the filmmaker. The story of a man with AIDS who wants to die with dignity on his own terms, Kleiser needed all the big names he could get to secure financing and distribution, and ONJ is in amongst a large crowd including George Segal, Lee Grant, Roddy McDowell, Sally Kellerman and many, many more. Though certainly not an “Olivia Newton-John film”, It’s My Party is a moving and highly emotional film that tackled a difficult issue largely unexplored in cinema at the time.
Post It’s My Party, ONJ made a lot of TV guest appearances, and also started to reveal a slightly naughtier, more risqué side to her personality, first with the broad 2000 comedy Sordid Lives (about a “white trash” American family), and then with 2011’s riotous A Few Best Men, a typically raunchy and rude comedy from Aussie director Stephan Elliot (Welcome To Woop Woop, Priscilla). ONJ starts the film as a proper politician’s wife (Grease’s Sandy all grown up, if you will), and by the second half is the ultimate party girl. “I’d met her once or twice, and thought that she was an absolute riot,” Stephan Elliott told FilmInk upon the film’s release. “She’s got this filthy laugh that she never lets out. I was at a function with her one night, and just heard that laugh. It was gold. She’s at the right point in her life where she’s changed everything – she remarried, and she got out of LA. She had a total change in her life, and when I saw the character, I just thought that it was so right. I sent it to her and she said, ‘Oh dear, this is a bit dangerous!’ I said, ‘Yep, it’s time, don’t you think?’ She was on a plane reading it, and she had the same reaction that I did. She had a couple of very big laughs and she just went, ‘Let’s give it a go!’ You can see that attitude there. She really lets go for the first time in her life. I kept saying to her the whole time, ‘Sandy’s dead! Sandy’s dead! We’re going to kill Sandy!’”
Along with the 2010 kids’ sports flick Score: A Hockey Musical, ONJ’s final big screen appearances would be with two brief and very self-aware cameos, first alongside her daughter Chloe as two Goth-looking oddballs in 2017’s Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, and then in the ill-advised 2020 meta-fest The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee. Not the best capper to a fascinating career on the big screen, but Olivia Newton-John has left us so much cinematically, with one truly great musical, one quite extraordinary one, and some other films that show off her abilities with both drama and broad comedy. “I simply have a marvellous life, a very lucky life,” the late, great Olivia Newton-John once said, and we were lucky too to see some of it up on-screen.
