john travolta
John Travolta. Born on February 18, 1954, in Englewood, New
Jersey, of Italian-Irish descent. Highly popular young star
of American TV and movies of the late 70's and later a likable
lead of the 90's. A high school dropout at 16, he began his
acting career in summer stock in New Jersey. After a period
of training in acting and dancing he began doing commercials
and off-Broadway. He moved to Hollywood, where he got occasional
small roles on TV, then joined the national touring company
of "Grease", eventually making the Broadway casts
of "Grease" and the Andrews Sisters' musical "Over
Here!". He got his big break in 1975 when he joined the
cast of the TV series "Welcome Back, Kotter", in the
role of dimwitted but lovable Vinnie Barbarino. Although his
role in the series was secondary, he immediately attracted an
enthusiastic following and soon became one of television's top
stars. Film assignments quickly followed. An appealing young
man with a dazzling grin, luminous blue eyes, and a characteristic
cleft chin, he extended his popularity to the big screen with
a convincing performance in the role of Tony Manero, king of
the Brooklyn disco scene, in the film Saturday Night Fever (1977)
and enjoyed another success with the screen version of Grease
(1978), and with Urban Cowboy (1980), which helped popularize
Western wear in the early 80's. During this period, he also
released a few hit records, having done all his own singing
in Grease.
Born the youngest of six children to tire salesman and former
semiprofessional football player Salvatore Travolta and high
school drama teacher Helen Travolta, John was a late-in-life
baby, and therefore a miracle according to his Roman Catholic
parents: his upbringing was appropriately pampered and permissive.
Encouraged to yield to creative whims, the Travolta offspring
staged nightly shows in the basement of their suburban New Jersey
home, where their kindly father had constructed a theatre for
their amusement. This nurturing childhood naturally led to thoughts
of a life onstage, and by the age of twelve, little Johnny had
already joined an actors workshop in his hometown of Englewood.
Soon he was appearing in local musicals and dinner-theatre engagements
and indulging his natural inclination to groove by taking tap
lessons from Gene Kelly's (lesser-known) brother Fred.
Travolta came away from the latter with something equally significant,
his first major romantic relationship, with Diana Hyland, the
older (by eighteen years) actress who played his mother in the
movie. One year later, in 1977, Travolta held his lover in his
arms as she died of cancer. (Travolta's mother succumbed to
the disease within two years of Hyland; it was in the wake of
her death that he first turned to the Church of Scientology
seeking solace.) The very bad year ended on a happy note, though,
when the release of John Badham's box-office smash Saturday
Night Fever, in which Travolta played cocky Brooklynite disco
king Tony Manero, birthed an honest-to-God John Travolta craze:
before you could say "Stayin' Alive," three-piece
polyester suits, gold chains, and duck-butt haircuts were making
astonishing inroads into the fashion sensibility of an entire
nation. (Tony's original white get-up recently fetched a record-setting
$145,500 at a Christie's auction, to give you an idea of this
guy's cultural impact.)
The touchstone of an era, Saturday Night Fever grossed over
$350 million and paved the way to the promised land for its
disco-dancing star. Travolta followed up his Oscar-nominated
performance in the movie with lead roles in the film version
of the musical Grease (as a slick, singing greaser), and in
Urban Cowboy (as a macho honky-tonk-patronizing Texan). He seemed
destined to symbolize the pop-culture landscape, regardless
of role: his Tony Manero ignited the disco fad of the late seventies;
his Danny launched a revival of fifties music and fashion; his
Buford "Bud" Davis made mechanical bull-riding a nationwide
fad of embarrassing proportions. Iconic status aside, Travolta's
career was nonetheless headed for a major and inevitable derailment:
the late seventies and most of the next decade dished up a seemingly
endless string of box-office bummers (witness Moment to Moment,
Two of a Kind, Perfect, and The Experts) and, for various reasons,
he gave the thumbs-down to leads in Days of Heaven, American
Gigolo, and An Officer and a Gentleman, plum roles greedily
snatched up by Richard Gere. By the mid-eighties, Travolta was
dodging the slings and arrows of outrageously bad fortune: if
not persona non grata around Hollywood, he was certainly yesterday's
news, and as yesterday's news he endured ugly tabloid rumors
that he was gay, bisexual, fat, and hopelessly under the sway
of a mind-controlling cult--the cult being the mysterious and
misunderstood Church of Scientology.
Yet Travolta somehow preserved his innate cool through all
his trials. Even during the darkest hours of his relegation
to icon hell, his lavish lifestyle--complete with a twenty-bedroom
waterfront Maine chateau, the French provincial in Florida,
the pads in Carmel, Santa Barbara, and Hollywood, his stable
of luxury automobiles, and the three jets he pilots himself--remained
intact, for a number of reasons. Reason number one: Travolta
had secured a percentage of the profits from the Saturday Night
Fever and Grease soundtracks (which sold in excess of 19-million
copies). Reason number two: not all of the doltish movies in
which he starred during the dark years were flops (Look Who's
Talking, and to a lesser extent its two equally inane sequels,
were considered box-office winners). Reason number three: Travolta
always maintained a winning attitude about his losing streak:
"I've always thought that as long as I did the right things
and had the right intentions, everything would fall into place."
Travolta's home life finally fell into place when he wed actress
Kelly Preston in 1992; their son Jett arrived the following
year. With the life-ordering support of family and his galvanizing
faith in Scientology in place, career lightning up and struck
a second time, in the form of Pulp Fiction. Just like that,
Travolta once again topped every director's A-list. Not only
did he resuscitate a basically flat-lined career with his winning
portrayal of the paunchy, ponytailed Vincent, but he has thus
far managed to keep hurtling forward at a dizzying pace, with
roles as a loan shark-cum-film producer in Get Shorty, as a
villainous bastard in director John Woo's Broken Arrow, and
as a mechanic turned genius in Phenomenon. After the success
of Get Shorty, everyone's favorite Comeback Kid landed a $17-million
contract to headline Roman Polanski's The Double, but "creative
differences" led to Travolta's swift exodus. Production
ground to a halt (despite the fact that Travolta's reins were
handed over to the capable Steve Martin, co-star Isabelle Adjani
apparently developed her own case of cold feet) and Travolta
was subsequently slapped with a breach-of-contract suit; he
countersued for breach of contract, fraud, and interference.
Not that Travolta doesn't have plenty of work to fill the void:
apart from starring roles in Michael, Face/Off, and the upcoming
Mad City, he inherited (from Tom Hanks) the role of a U.S. president
whose libido runs amok, in Universal's adaptation of Primary
Colors, the best-selling satire of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential
campaign.
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