Newton-John made her first solo record, “If Not for You,” in 1971, but it was her 1974 single “I Honestly Love You” that made her an international name. She stayed there through her early twenties, cutting demos and performing in European clubs with her friend Pat Carroll as the duo called Pat and Olivia. When Newton-John was five, the family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where, as a teen-ager, she won a local talent competition that brought her back to London. Photograph from Paramount Pictures / Alamy Newton-John’s performance in “Grease” is one of the all-time great film débuts. “Alas, sultry wasn’t in the cards for me because I was still that nine-year-old in her pj’s,” she writes, adding, of the scene in “Grease” in which Sandy attempts to smoke with the Pink Ladies, “Art imitating life!” Later, when she was singing in London clubs at nineteen, Newton-John would try to smoke again, thinking that it might give her the sultry voice of Julie London. At nine years old, her mother gave her one to smoke, and the experience was so unpleasant that it put her off of the urge entirely. Her father used to smoke while reading her bedtime stories, and a young Newton-John was intensely drawn to trying cigarettes. “I wonder where I got my perfectionism from?” she writes in her memoir. (Newton-John’s mother later translated a book of Born and Einstein’s letters.) Both parents encouraged Newton-John’s musicality, and she claimed that her father could have been a singer himself if he hadn’t been so self-critical. Her mother, a writer, was the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish physicist Max Born, a longtime friend and collaborator of Albert Einstein’s who fled Nazi Germany in 1933. 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.

Olivia newton john grease 1976