Olivia Newton-John, cleverest family ever!

                                   

Olivia and her father Bryn Newton-John

Olivia Newton-John (1948-2022) was born in Cambridge to Bryn Newton-John (1914–92) and Irene Born (1914–2003). Born in middle­-class Wales, Bryn became an MI5 of­f­ic­er on the En­igma pro­ject at Bl­etchley Park that took Rudolf Hess into custody in WW2. After the war, he bec­ame princ­ip­al of the Camb­r­idgeshire Boys High School and was in this post when Olivia was born. Her mother was born in Germany and moved to Britain with her family in 1933 to escape Nazism.

Olivia was the youngest of three children, after bro­ther Dr Hugh (1939–2019) and her sister actress Rona (1941–2013) who married rest­aurateur Brian Gold­sm­ith. In early 1954 when Olivia was 5, her family emigrated to Aust­ralia. Her father worked as a Professor of Ger­man and the master of Ormond Coll­ege at prestigious University of Melbourne. Ol­iv­ia stud­ied at Christ Church Grammar School South Yarra, and then pres­t­igious University High School Parkville.

She initially performed in clubs and TV shows, and reach­ed stardom aft­er her Grammy Award-winning hits I Honestly Love You and Physical, huge successes. In 1974, she released her next album Long Live Love and made the US Bill­board Hot 100. She con­t­inued to release successful albums th­r­oughout the 1970s and 80s, and won her 4th Grammy Award for her video collect­ion Olivia Physical. In total, Olivia released 30 albums in her career and sold c100 million rec­ords worldwide.

She played the lead role in the 1978 romantic musical film Grease, the film’s soundtrack being one of the most succ­ess­ful ever. Dir­ected by Ran­dal Kleiser, the film was a huge success crit­ical­ly and commercially (earning $395 million on a $6 million budget). The sound­­track earned an Oscar nomin­at­ion, and other awards. 

Grease, 1978

Other films included Xanadu (1980), She’s Having a Baby (1988) and It’s My Party (1996). She was last seen in the 2011 Australian-British com­edy film A Few Best Men, dir­ected by Dean Craig. She also app­eared in several TV shows, includ­ing American Idol.

Olivia was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, and survived a tax­ing chemotherapy treatment. She was an entrepreneur and activist for envir­on­mental and animal rights issues, and also advocated for breast cancer research. After es­tablishing the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, she recovered and was cancer-free for se­v­eral years before her cancer returned in 2017. Later it painfully spread to Ol­iv­ia's bones; she died in Aug 2022 at 73. RIP

How did Olivia Newton-John make such a brilliant career for herself? In my opinion, she picked her ancestors very carefully. Her maternal grandfather was German Jew­ish physic­ist Max Born (1882-1970), arguab­ly one of the cleverest scientists of his era. He was most famous for his work on quan­t­um mechanics, showing that the wave funct­ion could be in­t­er­p­reted as the prob­ability amplitude of finding a particle at a spec­if­­ic point in space and a specific moment in time.

5fth Solvay Conference, Brussels 1927.
Max Born was 2nd from right in middle row.

Look for other geniuses: Wolfgang Pauli, William Lawrence Bragg, Niels Bohr, Max Plan­ck, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.

Jewish born and raised, Born was of­fic­ially bap­tised as a Lutheran in 1914, before Irene's bir­th. He had to escape Germany to the UK on the accession of the Nazis to power in 1933. Two years later he pub­l­ish­ed The Restless Universe, an introduction to modern physics. Born became a natur­alised British citizen in 1939 and a Fellow of the Royal Soc­iety that year. He was offered a professorship at the Univ­ers­ity of Edin­bur­gh by the physicist grandson of Charles Darwin, and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954.

Maternal grandmother Hedwig was the daughter of German Jewish legal sch­olar Victor Ehren­berg (1851-1929), and of his Lut­h­eran wife Helene von Jhering (1852-1920), daughter of the legal historian Rudolf von Jhering (1828–1892). After Wolf­enbüttel gymnasium Victor Ehren­berg studied le­gal science in Gött­ingen, Lei­pzig, Heidelberg and Freiburg, then lect­ured at Univers­it­ies of Göt­t­ingen (from 1877), Rostock and Lei­pzig (un­til 1922). Victor’s son Rud­olf Ehren­berg was Pro­f of Phys­iol­ogy & Med­icine at Göttingen Uni; his daughter Hedwig Ehrenberg (1891–1972) married scientist Max Born.

Victor Ehrenberg  

Note Ol­ivia’s more distant relatives who included composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) and philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929)

Olivia's German-British un­cle Gustav Vic­tor Born, (1921–2018) was nother son of scientist Max Born and Hedwig Ehrenberg. Family photos showed him as a young child on Einst­ein's knee, and he playing for happy hours making paper airplanes from German theoret­ical physic­ist and quantum mechanics expert Werner Heisen­berg's maths notes. After fleeing Ger­m­any in 1933, Gustav studied medicine at Edinburgh Uni and served with the Roy­al Army Medical Corps, seeing Hir­oshima’s atomic bomb. He focused on the survivors’ severe bleeding disor­ders, the lack of plate­­lets coming­ from radiation da­mage.

As the Prof of Pharmac­ology at King's College London, and Prof at Wil­liam Harvey Res­earch Instit­ute and The London School of Medicine and Dent­is­try, Prof Gustav Born de­vel­oped a device to measure the plate­let agg­regation rate which re­vol­ut­ionised the dia­g­nosis of platelet­-related blood diseases, and help­ed devel­op­ antiplatelet medicines. He revolut­ion­ised cardiology and haem­atology, and reduced the risk of heart att­ack/stroke for millions worldwide. What a family!