Olivia Newton-John on living with cancer: “I’ve lost too many friends this year”
EXCLUSIVE: The music legend opens up to the Mirror about her health, being made a Dame, her singing comeback and her brand new foundation
Olivia Newton-John may now be a Dame, but if that means she is supposed to act the grand lady, she didn’t get the memo.
The pop legend has spent her time in lockdown ankle-deep in horse manure, pottering in her garden or baking bread.
She laughs, telling me: “It’s been very grounding mucking out the horses.”
Speaking from the sun-kissed study of her home in Santa Barbara, California, the 72-year-old singer and actress looks radiant, the low-key way of life clearly agreeing with her.
But the last few months have also been tinged with sadness.
She says: “I’ve lost way too many friends to cancer. And in the last year I lost three or four women I knew.”
Among them was her close friend actress Kelly Preston. The wife of Olivia’s Grease co-star John Travolta died in July after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
It is a disease Olivia knows too well.
She has been diagnosed with breast cancer three times since 1992 and survived.
When it returned for the third time in 2017, the tumour was shrunk using natural and conventional therapies, alongside radiotherapy.
But by 2018 the pain was becoming difficult to bear and she found out the cancer had spread to the base of her spine, causing a fracture.
When I first met Olivia a year ago at her beautiful mountain-side home, she was a little unsteady on her feet, having had to learn to walk again following a spell in a wheelchair.
But she was warm, funny and, more importantly, had several glasses of wine on hand when my dictaphone stopped.
This time, due to Covid, we are speaking on Zoom, but she is just as upbeat, despite “living with cancer”.
She says: “I feel really good. My walking is much better. I just have a little neuropathy thing on a couple of my toes that cause me a little discomfort, but I’m much more mobile than I was a year ago.”
She is planning a music comeback, and has set up the Olivia Newton-John Foundation to fund research into “kinder”, more holistic cancer treatments.
She says: “The death of my friends has only strengthened my resolve to find a world beyond cancer.”
But she will admit she has melancholy moments about her own health.
She says: “I’m human. I have had moments of fear, and all those things, just like everybody. But I talk myself round. There’s no way around pain. You have to go through it, but you’ll come out the other side if you believe strongly enough that it is just temporary.
“I’ve been dealing with this for a very long time, so I know how important the mind is in your journey. I really believe in that, in positive thinking, and reinforcing, talking to my body, and thanking it. It’s all up to that.”
Four decades after Sandy and Danny danced and sang their way into our hearts in Grease, her bond with 66-year-old Travolta endures today.
Last year they thrilled fans by turning up at a “Meet ’n’ Grease” sing-along in Florida, John in a leather T-Bird jacket and Olivia in trademark yellow skirt and matching cardigan.
John’s wife Kelly was 57 when she died in July. They had been married for 29 years and had three children.
Olivia says: “John and Kelly chose to keep their journey private. So I honoured that, and I won’t discuss any of that. But, of course, I care about him greatly and the family, and they’re doing as well as can be expected. John’s a lovely man. He’s a very sensitive, sweet, funny person, and extremely talented.
“I forget what an amazing actor he is. Sometimes I see him in films that I haven’t seen, and he’s playing a totally different character than I’ve ever seen before. He’s really wonderful.”
Amid her own surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, Olivia has become a big advocate of medical cannabis.
Her husband, John Easterling, 58, cultivates acres of cannabis at their property, which he turns into drops for Olivia to take on her tongue.
She says: “I weaned myself off morphine with cannabis after I left the hospital last, two years ago.
“And that’s a huge feat as morphine is a very addictive drug. I’m doing fantastic.”
Research into cannabis and plant-based medicine is key to her foundation. She says: “I just want to help people live better with cancer. I’m living well with it. I think that that’s an important message.”
Olivia recorded a song with her old pal Barry Gibb last year for his album, but admits: “I had no plans of singing, really, again. But a woman who I had briefly met sent me a song saying, ‘My cousin wrote this song, and you have to record it’. I’ve had those before and usually they’re not good. So I was ready to have to tell her, ‘I’m sorry’.”
But she had a change of heart when she listened to it. She says: “It was great, it moved me to tears. I had to record it, it’s almost like a calling.”
She has recorded it with Chloe Lattanzi, 34, her daughter by first husband Matt Lattanzi.
But it’s unlikely to be as raunchy as Olivia’s biggest hit, Physical, which caused a storm in 1981.
She says: “I recorded the song then I had a panic attack that I had maybe gone too far, because when I was recording it, I was really thinking about how the lyrics might be taken.
“So I called my manager Roger Davies and go, ‘Mate, I’m worried about it. I think we should pull it. I think I’ve gone too far’. He said, ‘Too late, love. It’s out there. And it’s doing really well’. And it went to number one for 10 weeks or something ridiculous.”
The real question is, of course, what happened to those pink leggings she famously squeezed into for the video?
She says: “Oh, gosh. I think they’re long gone. Listen, when you do a video shoot, I had no idea in my mind or in the world that 40 years later, some would be interested in any of it. I’ve been so lucky… Grease, Xanadu, Physical, all these things have stood the test of time. It’s all pretty amazing.”
Surprisingly, her parents were academic. Welsh dad Bryn was in MI5 and worked on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park, and her German mum Irene was the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, a friend of Albert Einstein.
Olivia’s brother, Hugh, became a doctor and sister, Rona, an actor.
So what did her parents make of Olivia’s showbiz success. She says: “I think in the beginning they were really worried because they wanted me to go to university and get a degree. They were very down-to-earth academics.
“My sister was the first black sheep becoming an actress. But obviously, as time went on and my career went well, they were very pleased for me.”
*Olivia is auctioning off hundreds of her possessions and memorabilia via Julien’s Auction on November 30th.
Bidding is open now and 100% of proceeds benefit her foundation.
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