Olivia Newton-John

The Australian singer who spent a decade as the most wholesome figure in American pop and then dismantled that reputation on purpose. Born in Cambridge, England in 1948 and raised in Melbourne from the age of five, Newton-John broke through in the early 1970s as a country-pop singer so unthreatening that Nashville objected to her winning its awards. If You Love Me, Let Me Know and Have You Never Been Mellow both topped the American album chart. Then came Sandy in Grease in 1978, the highest-grossing musical film of its time, and the turn began — Totally Hot that same year, and in 1981 Physical, whose title track spent ten weeks at No.1 and became the biggest Billboard hit of the entire decade.

She won four Grammy Awards, scored five American No.1 singles, and sold more than one hundred million records, making her the highest-selling female Australian recording artist of all time. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, she spent the next three decades on cancer research and patient care, founding the wellness and research centre in Melbourne that carries her name, and was appointed a Dame in 2020. She died on August 8, 2022 at her home in Santa Ynez, California, at seventy-three. The catalog she left behind runs from Nashville country to synth-driven dance-pop, and she was never entirely comfortable being only one of those things.