John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta is an American actor. He began acting in television before transitioning into a leading man in films. His accolades include a Primetime Emmy Award and three Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Travolta came to prominence starring in the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, followed by a supporting performance in Carrie and then leading roles in Grease, Urban Cowboy, and Blow Out. He earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. His other notable films include Get Shorty, Broken Arrow, Michael, Face/Off, A Civil Action, Primary Colors, The General's Daughter, The Punisher, Wild Hogs, Hairspray, Bolt, and Savages.
Travolta returned to television portraying lawyer Robert Shapiro in the series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. He received an Emmy Award as a producer as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. He was also Emmy-nominated for his role in the action-comedy web series Die Hart.
Outside of acting, Travolta has released nine albums, including four singles that have charted on the Billboard Hot 100's Top 40. His albums have typically accompanied films he has starred in, such as Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture, which topped the Billboard 200. Travolta is also a private pilot.
Early life
John Joseph Travolta was born on February 18, 1954, in Englewood, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. He was the youngest of six children.His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta, was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company, Travolta Tire Exchange. His mother, Helen Cecilia, was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher. His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theater and drama and became actors. His father was a second-generation Italian American with roots in Godrano, Sicily, and his mother was Irish American.
He grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. He was raised Catholic, but later converted to Scientology in 1975 at age 21. He converted after being given the book Dianetics from former actress Joan Prather. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School, but dropped out as a junior at age 17 in 1971.
Career
1970s
After dropping out of school, Travolta moved across the Hudson River to New York City and landed a role in the touring company of the musical Grease as Doody and on Broadway in Over Here!, singing the Sherman Brothers' song "Dream Drummin'". He then moved to Los Angeles for professional reasons. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in Emergency! in September 1972, but his first significant movie role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie directed by Brian de Palma. Around that time, he landed his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared.Travolta had a hit single titled "Let Her In", peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. In the next few years, he starred in the television movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and two of his most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in the dance drama Saturday Night Fever and Danny Zuko in the musical Grease. The films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. His mother and his sister Ann appeared very briefly in Saturday Night Fever and his sister Ellen played a waitress in Grease. Travolta performed on the Grease soundtrack album. After the failure of the romance Moment by Moment, in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta rebounded in 1980, riding a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy, in which he starred with Debra Winger.
1980s
Travolta followed up Urban Cowboy with a starring role in Brian de Palma's 1981 film Blow Out, which was critically lauded but a box office disappointment, likely due to its bleak ending. After Blow Out came a series of commercial and critical failures which sidelined Travolta's acting career. These included Two of a Kind, a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect, co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive, the 1983 sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously to portray a professional dancer and lost ; the film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics.During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash, which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking, which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease.
1990s
Travolta subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too and Look Who's Talking Now, but it was not until he played against type as Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L. Jackson, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. It was Travolta's third film alongside Bruce Willis. The movie shifted him back onto the A-list and notable roles that followed include a movie-buff loan shark in Get Shorty, a factory worker in White Man's Burden, a corrupt U.S. Air Force pilot in Broken Arrow, an everyman with extraordinary powers in Phenomenon, an archangel in Michael, an FBI agent and terrorist in Face/Off, a desperate attorney in A Civil Action, a Bill Clinton–esque presidential candidate in Primary Colors, and a military investigator in The General's Daughter.2000s
In 2000, Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth, based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film was a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982, when Hubbard wrote to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards.Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in Lucky Numbers ; Swordfish ; Domestic Disturbance ; Ladder 49 ; Be Cool ; Lonely Hearts ; Wild Hogs ; the Disney animated film Bolt, in which Travolta voiced the title character; The Taking of Pelham 123; and Old Dogs.
In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray, his first musical since Grease.
2010s
Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers, such as From Paris with Love and Savages. In 2014, Travolta made headlines for mispronouncing the name of Idina Menzel by calling her "Adele Dazeem" during the live broadcast of the 86th Academy Awards; he subsequently apologized and expressed embarrassment for the error. The mispronunciation evolved into a popular internet meme which ultimately boosted Menzel's popularity, causing Menzel to remark that Travolta's error "was one of the best things that happened" in her career. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. For his performance he received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.2020s
Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating, "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don't hear from us for a while".Other ventures
Aviation
Travolta is a pilot and rated to fly Boeing 707 and 747 planes. He owns four aircraft. Travolta owned an ex-Qantas Boeing 707-138B which bears an old livery of Qantas, and Travolta acted as an official goodwill ambassador for the airline wherever he flew. Travolta named his 707 "Jett Clipper Ella", in honor of his children. The "Clipper" in the name refers to the use of that word by Pan Am as the company's call sign as well as in the names of their aircraft. In 2017, Travolta donated the Boeing 707 to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society near Wollongong, Australia. This was expected to be flown to Australia in November 2019, but was later delayed to sometime in 2020 due to condition of the aircraft. Travolta planned to be on board when the aircraft was to be flown to Illawarra Regional Airport, where HARS is based, but was not allowed to fly it, because it was to be registered as an Australian aircraft.On November 24, 1992, Travolta was piloting his Gulfstream N728T at night above a solid undercast when he experienced a total electrical system failure while flying under instrument flight rules into Washington National Airport. During the emergency landing, he almost had a mid-air collision with a USAir Boeing 727, an event attributed to a risky decision by an air traffic controller.
In 1984, Travolta was inducted into the American Academy of Achievement and presented with the Golden Plate Award by Awards Council member General Chuck Yeager, USAF. Travolta was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation in 2007 and acts as the award show's official ambassador.
On September 13, 2010, during the first episode of the final season of her talk show, Oprah Winfrey announced that she would be taking her entire studio audience on an eight-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Australia, with Travolta serving as pilot for the trip. He had helped Winfrey plan the trip for more than a year.
He is the author of the book Propeller One-Way Night Coach, the story of a young boy's first flight.
His estate in Ocala, Florida, is situated at Jumbolair Airport with its own runway and taxiway right to his house, with two outbuildings for covered access to planes.