A LITTLE MORE LOVE

A biography of the late pop singer and occasional actress.

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’s 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’s voice would ultimately win her four Grammys and a career-resuscitating starring role in 1978’s smash movie musical Grease, which both embalmed and spoofed her squeaky-clean image. By all accounts herein—Hild interviewed a good number of the singer’s friends, acquaintances, and collaborators—Newton-John was a human spigot of kindness, which may make her a saint, but it doesn’t make her especially interesting. If anyone ever said a negative word about his subject, Hild apparently hasn’t 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’s life. While not a prose stylist, he dutifully chronicles Newton-John’s 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’t try to manufacture luridness, although one wonders if he might have considered not taking everything his ostensibly egoless subject said at face value—e.g., “For Olivia…whether or not the album became a hit was not the point.” Are we so sure it wasn’t?

A gift for those hopelessly devoted to Newton-John; serviceable for everyone else.