There’s a limited idea that Olivia Newton-John’s career, whether in cinema or pop, ran solely from “virginal girl-next-door” to “spandex-clad vixen”, as one rather snotty obituary put it. While that transformation may apply to her most famous role as Sandy in the musical Grease, it does a disservice to how ably – and convincingly – the chameleonic British-Australian musician shape-shifted between genres and rode the changing moods of pop to become one of the biggest hit-makers of her era and an enduring cult icon.
Newton-John broke out at the beginning of the 1970s as a country-pop singer, with single If Not For You, a Bob Dylan cover, becoming an unexpected hit in North America. She cemented her reputation in the genre with the assertive, Grammy-winning Let Me Be There, her first US Top 10 hit, the ballad I Honestly Love You and the plaintive Please Mr Please, which reached No 3 in the US pop charts, No 5 in its country charts and No 1 in easy listening. By 1974, she had been named female vocalist of the year by the Country Music Association, and not without controversy – Newton-John beat Nashville royalty such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to the prize, which prompted an industry protest.
It couldn’t stop Newton-John’s almost total pop-cultural domination. While she continued to thrive as a country artist, that same year, she won the UK fourth place at the Eurovision song contest with Long Live Love – and the rousing, oompah beat and valedictory message had more than a little in common with Abba’s winning song, Waterloo. By the end of the 70s, she would become a global star thanks to her role as ingenue turned femme fatale Sandy in Grease, which owed a great part of its success to new original songs written specifically for Newton-John by her longtime producer John Farrar. The innocent ballad Hopelessly Devoted to You combined 50s classicism with her distinctive pop-country vocals; not only did You’re the One That I Want let Newton-John and John Travolta show off their vocal chops over a rockabilly bass line, it also prompted a major semantic shift in Newton-John’s personal pop persona. While she was known for singing of love and devotion, here she explicitly sings about wanting someone. Alongside Summer Nights, they all made the US Top 5; Grease became the highest-grossing film of 1978, and the highest-grossing musical film worldwide at the time, dethroning The Sound of Music – a title it held until 2012.
The transformation that Newton-John’s character Sandy undergoes in Grease brought on a comparable shift in her public appearance and music career. That year, she released the album Totally Hot, moving away from a purely country sound with the rock-inflected A Little More Love and the sophisticated Deeper Than the Night. The change didn’t scare the horses, with the album eventually going platinum in the US. More strident changes were yet to come: her 1981 album Physical spawned a punchy single of the same name that spent 10 weeks as US No 1 (becoming her most successful hit) and also represented Newton-John adding another medium to her already considerable quiver: the pop video.
In 1982, she released Olivia Physical, a VHS offering a video for every song on the album. “I think this is the way albums will go in the future – visuals with the music,” she told Billboard in 1981 (35 years before Beyoncé’s “visual album” Lemonade). “I got to be a different personality and play another side of myself.” The music video for the single Physical wasn’t just notable for how Newton-John portrays sexual innuendo, her assertiveness over men desperately trying to lose weight at the gym and her popularisation of the headband as a fashion accessory: one version sees two of the men leave together, implying they’re a couple, which cemented Newton-John’s status as an LGBTQ+ icon.
That decade, Newton-John’s knack for vocal shapeshifting managed to elevate some insubstantial movies. In 1980’s roller-disco-themed romance Xanadu, she plays Kira, muse to a snivelling commercial artist. While the script and the acting are nothing to write home about, the soundtrack, composed in part by Electric Light Orchestra and performed by Newton-John, masterfully combines her distinctive vocals with innovative electronic bass. And the chameleon struck again in 1983’s Two of Kind, which reunited her with her Grease co-star Travolta. While the film was critically panned, its soundtrack was a hit – although the Laura Branigan-worthy, synth-oriented Twist of Fate would end up being Newton-John’s last US Top 10 single.
Perhaps Newton-John’s capacity for reinvention had reached its limit; or maybe ageism shunted an artist now in her mid-30s to pop’s sidelines as teen pop stars took centre stage. Undeterred, she continued to expand her artistry to reflect her maturing outlook on life: she sang about the environment and Aids on her 1988 album The Rumour, and wrote about her experiences with breast cancer on 1994’s introspective Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, her first album as sole songwriter.
While she faded from the pop mainstream, her peers knew when credit was due: Mariah Carey invited her to perform Hopelessly Devoted to You live in Australia in 1998; Dua Lipa’s 2020 single Physical is evidently (shamelessly) indebted to Newton-John’s hit of the same name. “Since I was 10 years old, I have loved and looked up to Olivia Newton-John,” Kylie Minogue tweeted. “And I always will.” And even without those namechecks, Newton-John’s legacy endures: as one of the earliest women in pop to embrace different eras, genres, sounds and even self-presentation, she lives on in the DNA of every female pop star’s self-reinvention.
