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John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe Award-winning American actor and singer. He established his career as a leading Hollywood actor with films such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta enjoyed a career revival in the 1990s, stemming from his role in Pulp Fiction.
Travolta, youngest of six children, was born in Englewood, New Jersey, to Salvatore Travolta, a second-generation Italian American semi-professional football player turned tire salesman, and Helen Cecilia Burke, an Irish American[1] [2] actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama teacher. She was 42 when Travolta was born. Travolta grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood[3] and has said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. His family was Catholic.[4]
After dropping out of Dwight Morrow High School after his junior year, Travolta moved to New York City to get a job as a performer. He landed roles in the touring company of Grease (musical) and on Broadway in Over Here! singing the Sherman Brothers' song "Dream Drummin'.'" Travolta also cut singles for a local record company, but the songs were quickly forgotten. But eventually, he moved to Los Angeles to further his career in show business.
Travolta's first television role was as a fall victim in Emergency! in 1973, but his first major movie role as Billy Nolan, a sadistic bully who taunted Sissy Spacek's Carrie White in the horror film Carrie (1976). Around the same time he landed his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino in the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979) in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared (as Arnold Horshack's mother).
Around this time he also had a hit single entitled "Let Her In" peaking at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the next few years, he appeared in some of his most memorable screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and as Danny Zuko in Grease (1978). His mother and his sister Ann appeared as extras in Saturday Night Fever and his sister Ellen appeared as a waitress in Grease. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album, that eventually went on to sell more than 10 million copies. In 1980, Travolta inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film, Urban Cowboy, in which he starred with Debra Winger.
After Urban Cowboy came a string of flops that sidelined his acting career. Some suggest that he was typecast as a disco stud or 1970s icon, which could be the reason his agent intervened on several occasions to turn down acting roles. During that time he was offered, but turned down, lead roles in what would become box office hits, including American Gigolo, An Officer and A Gentleman, Splash and Fatal Attraction. The first two films ultimately starred Richard Gere in the lead role and went to become box office successes. This was also the case much later in his career with the movie Chicago - the role of lawyer Billy Flynn was offered to Travolta, but ultimately was played by Gere; the film went on to become a highly commercial and critical success. His only hit film during this period was alongside Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis in Look Who's Talking. However, it wasn't until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. The movie shifted him back onto the A-list, and he was inundated with offers. Coincidentally, before Travolta took the role he visited Tarantino, who was living in the same ramshackle apartment in Los Angeles that Travolta had inhabited when he got his start. Notable roles following Pulp Fiction include a movie-buff loan shark in Get Shorty (1995), an FBI agent in Face/Off (1997), a desperate attorney in A Civil Action (1998) and a military detective in The General's Daughter (1999).
Travolta also starred in Battlefield Earth (2000) based on a work of science fiction by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office.[5] Travolta, who converted to Scientology in 1975 and endorses Hubbard's teachings, had hoped that the film would be well received and be the first in a series of Hubbard film adaptations. In fact, the film won a Razzie Award for Worst Film of the Year at the 2000 awards.
Travola is currently starring as a workaholic with a bad hairpiece turned biker in Wild Hogs 2007.
Travolta will play Edna Turnblad in the 2007 adaptation of Hairspray.
Travolta married actress Kelly Preston in 1991. They have a son named Jett, and a daughter named Ella Bleu. On April 10, 2006, Mark Ebner of Hollywood, Interrupted made a public plea to Travolta and Preston to have their son treated for autism, alleging five reliable sources—including representatives from Cure Autism Now and The Autism Perspective—who say that Jett suffers from autism, and not from Kawasaki syndrome as stated by the parents.[6][7][8] His brother Joey Travolta recently produced a documentary about autism.
Travolta is a FAA licensed pilot and owns five airplanes, including an ex-Australian airliner, the Qantas 707-138. The plane bears the name Jett Clipper Ella in honour of his son Jett and his daughter Ella. Pan Am was a large operator of the 707 and used Clipper in their names. The 707 aircraft bears the marks of Qantas, as Travolta acts as an official goodwill ambassador for the airline wherever he flies. His US$4.9 million estate in the Jumbolair subdivision in Ocala, Florida is situated on Greystone Airport with its own runway and taxiway right to the door.[9]
In 1992, he wrote and illustrated a short children's book entitled Propeller One-Way Night Coach about the fictional journey of an 8-year-old boy named Jeff across the USA in the 1950s.
Questions have also been raised regarding what kind of agreements were made between Travolta and then-President Bill Clinton, regarding how Travolta would portray Jack Stanton, a character based on Clinton, in the movie Primary Colors and whether Clinton would pressure the German government to remove its ban on Scientology. Travolta was quoted about the issue in May 1998 issue of George magazine:
In another interview, Travolta said that his portrayal of Stanton was much more kind than that in the book Primary Colors.[10] The next year, in November 1998, Clinton sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to urge German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel to stop being intolerant toward Scientologists.[11]
Travolta was previously involved with actress Diana Hyland, who died of breast cancer (reportedly in Travolta's arms) in 1977.[12]