John Travolta tells us what his mother taught him
JOHN TRAVOLTA’S screen hits – including Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Look Who’s Talking and Pulp Fiction – have made him one of Hollywood’s wealthiest stars.
The 59-year-old actor won a Crystal Globe lifetime achievement award at the Czech Karlovy Vary film festival last week.
John appears with Robert De Niro in new movie Killing Season. He is married to actress Kelly Preston.
Here he tells GARTH PEARCE what his late mother, Helen, taught him.
“I WAS taught by my mom Helen to embrace change.
“I was growing up in the 1960s and there were big issues — sexual, racial and women’s rights — being addressed at last. There was an excitement. The jet age had happened. It was jazzy, a good time for change.
“My mom was a drama teacher. My dad, Salvatore, sold tyres. We were a working-class family from New Jersey.
“She helped release all my ambitions. I wanted to be in the arts and she advised me to quit school at 16 and try to get paid for being on stage. We were always doing plays in the basement of our home from when I was about five.
“I was lucky to be born into a family of actors, including my older brother Joey and sister Ellen. There was my mom, dad, two brothers and three older sisters.
“The women in the family made sure women’s rights were never an issue — by having the best jobs. It’s the same today with my daughter Ella Bleu (aged 13).
“She knows she’s my darling girl and has me wrapped around her finger. It’s effortless. My mother had me at 42 and Kelly had our son Benjamin (born on November 23, 2010) at 48. So late births do happen in our family.
“Women have been so important in my life. I didn’t need to ask my wife how to play a woman for my film Hairspray (the 2007 musical). I’d grown up surrounded by women and had a lot of great memories.
“The women I liked growing up were Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. They were erotic to me. I have the ability to move in a curvaceous way. If you give me breasts and an ass — as I had in Hairspray, with the prosthetics — I can move!
“When my wife saw that movie, she cried. She found it moving, touching, sweet and funny. I like well-built women. To me, women are too skinny now. I married a voluptuous woman. She might not look it, but she is! Trust me on that.
“As for my obsession with planes, I would watch them from our back yard. I would follow passenger planes with my eyes until I could no longer see them.
“My mom knew I loved that they could accomplish those speeds and distances.
“So she took me to get my first flight — just a short one, so I could have lunch on the plane and come straight back. We went from Newark, New Jersey, to Philadelphia. It was only 30 minutes each way, with a propeller plane going and a Caravelle, a French jet, on the return. Wow! I was thrilled to the seat of my pants. From then on, I wanted a plane of my own and to be a pilot.
“I achieved that ambition, which gives me every bit as much satisfaction as being an actor. If anyone asks what car I drive, I joke: “A Boeing 707.”
“Acting and film is an art and is my livelihood. But as a passion, nothing beats aviation to me. So the arts and aviation — thanks to my mom’s inspiration.
“Family and knowing where you come from has always been important to me. I had a special relationship with the actor James Gandolfini (the Sopranos star died on June 19, aged 51) because we are from the same area. My father sold tyres to his father when we were younger. He would see my photo in the store window and that would inspire him to be an actor.
“One moment defines how I felt about him. When my son Jett passed away (following a seizure, aged 16, on January 2, 2009) he would not leave my home until he knew I was OK. I felt it was so human and unusual for an actor to have this depth of feeling about someone. He was a very special man.
“Such losses are my low points. I always see the glass as half full, not half empty — and that is probably down to my mother.
“She always saw the best in people and looked at life as something to be constantly enjoyed.
“So even today, when people try and beat optimism out of me, it just does not work.”
Culled from The SUN.UK
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Posted by John Travolta says acting as a woman came naturally on July 8, 2013 at 11:32 am
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