THE LAST time Dame Olivia Newton-John sang on a Glasgow stage was in 2017, at Celtic Connections.
The Grease star, who died earlier this week, was in town with Amy Sky and Beth Neilsen Chapman, performing a collection of songs about love and loss.
In a pre-show interview with our sister newspaper The Herald, Olivia was upbeat and excited about coming to the city – and she revealed her family’s Scottish connections (her sister was born in Edinburgh, while her father, Brinley Newton-John, was part of the team brought into identify Rudolf Hess when his plane crash-landed on the Eaglesham Moors at the end of the Second World War.)
Olivia, who had spoken openly about her experience with breast cancer, said in that 2017 interview that she lived a “pretty normal life” when she was not working.
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“I like to feed my horses and my dog and cat and my husband,” she said. “It’s pretty normal stuff. I don’t take my (professional) life too seriously.
“I don’t believe the press handouts. I think that’s how I’ve managed to survive. I don’t hear the good and the bad.”
Olivia was born in 1948 in Cambridge, where her dad was an Enigma Code scientist who became a university professor. The family moved to Melbourne in Australia when she was five years old.
At the age of 17, she returned to Britain, landed a spot on the Cliff Richard Show and had a string of hits. She was one of the world’s most commercially successful recording artists ever, with more than 100 million sales to her credit, but it was as goody-two-shoes-turned-sassy-bombshell Sandy in Grease, the teen musical comedy movie she made with John Travolta in 1978, that catapulted her to the heady heights of icon status.
It also gave Olivia two number ones - Hopelessly Devoted to You and You’re the One That I Want (which spent nine weeks at No 1 and is one of the highest-selling singles in British chart history.)
The tight black trousers and leather jacket Olivia wore in Grease were sold at auction for £313,000, which was donated to the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness and Research Centre.
Olivia represented the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with Long Live Love, coming fourth in the year an unknown Swedish group called ABBA won the honours.
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When she last came to Glasgow, she was 68, and she told our newspapers she was loving life.
“Since my breast cancer I’ve considered every year a gift,” she said.
“And apart from when my daughter, Chloe, was born I’m having the best time of my life.”
Olivia died on Monday, August 8, aged 73.
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