OLIVIA Letting go of fear
Olivia Newton-John sits cross-legged on a couch the colour of a dusky pink poppy. Afternoon light filters through windows, beyond which lie the fields and coops and barnyard animals of her storybook-pretty Californian farm. Raven, her German Shepherd, sleeps peacefully on the carpet. Her husband, John Easterling, pops into frame to say hello down the Zoom lens, touches her affectionately on the shoulder and moves on to tend to the medicinal cannabis and other herbs that he grows on the property. It’s a lazy, warm late summer afternoon, and it feels like siesta time (at least Raven thinks so), but Olivia has set this time aside to chat with The Weekly.
“I’m okay,” she says in answer to the obvious question, and she looks more than well – rosy-cheeked, bright eyed, relaxed; all easy, open conversation and unabashed smiles.
That said, Olivia concedes that living through the COVID outbreak in the United States hasn’t always been easy. She was admitted to hospital briefly earlier this year – a temporary road bump on the wellness journey that has seen her through a number of bouts with cancer since her first diagnosis in 1992. She’d rather not go into the details of that most recent hospital visit but she has fully recovered now, and she says it helped her to understand how frightening COVID has been for people with compromised health or immune systems.
“I was very afraid at the beginning,” she admits. “I
