Going with the idea that any household-name celebrity deserves a biography, this one gets the job done. Olivia Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, in 1948; in 1954, her father accepted a job at the University of Melbourne, taking the family with him. After Newton-John\u2019s mother gave her an acoustic guitar, the teenager started performing at coffee shops, scored a TV appearance, moved to London in hopes of snagging a record contract, and did precisely that. Newton-John\u2019s voice would ultimately win her four Grammys and a career-resuscitating starring role in 1978\u2019s smash movie musical Grease, which both embalmed and spoofed her squeaky-clean image. By all accounts herein\u2014Hild interviewed a good number of the singer\u2019s friends, acquaintances, and collaborators\u2014Newton-John was a human spigot of kindness, which may make her a saint, but it doesn\u2019t make her especially interesting. If anyone ever said a negative word about his subject, Hild apparently hasn\u2019t heard it. (Going by this book, the naughtiest thing Newton-John ever did was in her younger years, when she romanced a married man or two.) But Hild does well despite the lack of out-of-the-way drama in his subject\u2019s life. While not a prose stylist, he dutifully chronicles Newton-John\u2019s professional ups and downs: a record-label imbroglio, her tabloid-fodder divorce, her rampant charity work and environmental activism, and her recurring, ultimately losing, battle with breast cancer. (Newton-John died in 2022.) To his credit, Hild doesn\u2019t try to manufacture luridness, although one wonders if he might have considered not taking everything his ostensibly egoless subject said at face value\u2014e.g., \u201cFor Olivia\u2026whether or not the album became a hit was not the point.\u201d Are we so sure it wasn\u2019t?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Going with the idea that any household-name celebrity deserves a biography, this one gets the job done. Olivia Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, in 1948; in 1954, her father accepted a job at the University of Melbourne, taking the family with him. After Newton-John\u2019s mother gave her an acoustic guitar, the teenager started performing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}