The Jewish family history of Olivia Newton-John
The iconic pop singer and Grease star, who died on Monday aged 73, was Jewish in her maternal line and had a father who battled the Nazis
Tributes have been paid to Olivia Newton-John, the iconic pop singer of the 1970s and 80s who has died aged 73 at her home in southern California.
She was most famous for her starring role as Sandy Olsson alongside John Travolta’s Danny Zuko in the 1978 musical Grease and had been battling cancer for three decades.
Newton-John was Jewish in her maternal line: she was the daughter of Brinley Newton-John and Irene Born, the daughter of Max Born, a Jewish Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
Max Born was a friend of Albert Einstein who moved to England after being suspended from his position at a German university by the Nazi regime, a move that likely saved his life. There, his wife worked to help Jewish refugee women find employment.
Doreen Berger from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain added: “The original name of this distinguished German family, originating in Lissa in Germany, was Buttermilch.
“Irene’s mother, the mathematician, Hedwig Ehrenberg, was the a descendant of the German jurist, Rabbi Philipp Ehrenberg.”
Newton-John’s father, meanwhile, was an MI5 officer who took part in the Enigma project at Bletchley Park and took Rudolph Hess into custody during the Second World War.
After her parents’ divorce, her mother made a new life in Melbourne, Australia.
“My mother was very proud of her Jewish heritage and talked about it a lot,” Newton-John told an Israeli news network three years ago.
“It’s interesting: Some of my closest girlfriends are Jewish.”
She built a prolific and historic career as a pop singer over the decades, performing at Eurovision the year that ABBA won for Waterloo, earning an Oscar nomination for her performance in one of the most successful movie musicals of all time, headlining her own Las Vegas show and releasing chart-topping pop hits.
In 1992, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and became an advocate for cancer research.
Newton-John went into remission for 21 years, but the cancer returned in 2013 and again in 2017.
In a 2017 interview with NBC’s Today, she revealed that John Travolta had remained a longtime friend and had been supporting her throughout her ordeal with cancer.
Over the last two years, the song Hopelessly Devoted To You, which was sung by Newton-John in Grease and hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released, regained popularity on TikTok with original covers and talk-box remixes.
Newton-John is survived by her husband John Easterling and her daughter from her first marriage, Chloe Lattanzi.
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