John Travolta

Info

Full Name: John Travolta
Date of birth: February 18, 1954 (72 years old)
Location: Englewood, New Jersey
Country: USA

John Travolta has been active for 50 years, participating in 44 movies that average a 6.5/10 score.

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Biography

In May 2026, at 72, John Travolta walked onto a Cannes stage to collect an Honorary Palme d'Or he had no idea was coming. He was on the Croisette as a director that year, not as an actor, and the ovation ran for several minutes. "This is beyond the Oscars," he said. Nobody in the room needed that explained: behind him sat half a century of work, two Oscar nominations, a couple of resurrections and some spectacularly public failures.

He was born on 18 February 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, the youngest of six children in a household where wanting to perform raised nobody's eyebrows. His mother, Helen, had been an actress, singer and drama teacher; his father, Salvatore, co-owned a tyre shop and had played semi-professional football. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and moved to New York to try his luck on stage.

It came together faster than expected. He joined the touring company of 'Grease', playing Doody, made his Broadway debut in 'Over Here!' and in 1975 landed the sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter' as Vinnie Barbarino, the good-looking troublemaker at the back of the class. The part turned him into a teen idol overnight, complete with posters, magazine covers and a single of his own, 'Let Her In', which cracked the Billboard top ten.

Those same years brought his first real loss. While shooting the TV film 'The Boy in the Plastic Bubble' he fell in love with Diana Hyland, the actress playing his mother, who was eighteen years his senior. Hyland died of breast cancer in March 1977, aged 41. Six months later it was Travolta who collected, in tears, the Emmy she had been awarded posthumously.

The white suit and the leather jacket

His first substantial film role was the thuggish boyfriend who helps engineer the humiliation of 'Carrie' (1976), directed by Brian De Palma. A year later came 'Saturday Night Fever', in which John Badham turned him into Tony Manero, the Brooklyn kid who works the counter of a paint shop all week and owns the dancefloor on Saturday nights.

The film, the Bee Gees soundtrack and that white suit were everywhere in the late seventies, and they earned him his first Oscar nomination at 24. He doubled down straight away with 'Grease' (1978), where Randal Kleiser paired him with Olivia Newton-John.

Britain fell hardest of all. Danny and Sandy's two duets, 'You're the One That I Want' and 'Summer Nights', spent a combined sixteen weeks at number one on the UK singles chart in 1978, and the first of them is still one of the best-selling singles this country has ever produced. The film remains one of the most successful musicals ever made.

Then came the hangover. 'Urban Cowboy' (1980) still worked, and 'Blow Out' (1981), his reunion with De Palma, holds what is probably his finest performance of the decade, though audiences ignored it at the time. After that it was one stumble after another: 'Staying Alive' (1983), the 'Saturday Night Fever' sequel directed by Sylvester Stallone, then 'Two of a Kind' (1983) and 'Perfect' (1985). Within ten years he had gone from global phenomenon to an actor nobody was calling.

A comedy nobody saw coming pulled him out of it. 'Look Who's Talking' (1989), with Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis, took close to 300 million dollars and spawned two sequels. It wasn't prestige, but it was work.

Vincent Vega changed everything

The call that gave him his career back came in the early nineties. Quentin Tarantino, then a newcomer with exactly one released film, invited him over to his Los Angeles apartment. It turned out to be the same flat Travolta had lived in when he first arrived in the city. They spent the night playing board games based on 'Grease', 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Welcome Back, Kotter', and at the end of it Tarantino put two scripts in front of him.

Travolta passed on 'From Dusk Till Dawn' and took the other one. The studio wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, who was desperate for the part, but Tarantino threatened to walk and won the argument. That is how Vincent Vega turned up: the dim, heroin-fogged hitman of 'Pulp Fiction' (1994), the twist contest with Uma Thurman at Jack Rabbit Slim's and the circular nonsense conversations with Samuel L. Jackson. It brought him a second Oscar nomination and a whole second career.

The years that followed were the best of his professional life. He won the Golden Globe for 'Get Shorty' (1995), playing film-obsessed loan shark Chili Palmer opposite Gene Hackman, Rene Russo and Danny DeVito. Then came 'Broken Arrow', 'Phenomenon', 'Michael' and, best of all, 'Face/Off' (1997), John Woo's choreographed fever dream in which he literally swaps faces with Nicolas Cage.

He tried straighter material too. He was the southern presidential candidate with an appetite for trouble in 'Primary Colors' (1998), the ambitious lawyer of 'A Civil Action' and a passing general in Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line'. In 1999 he went back to mainstream thrillers with 'The General's Daughter'.

From 'Battlefield Earth' to Edna Turnblad

In 2000 he finally pushed through a pet project, an adaptation of 'Battlefield Earth', the science fiction novel by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, which Travolta has belonged to since 1975. It became one of the most talked-about disasters of its era, winning Razzies for worst picture and worst actor and picking up another a decade later as worst film of the 2000s.

What followed was a mixed bag. He alternated work-for-hire thrillers such as 'Swordfish' (2001) and 'The Taking of Pelham 123' (2009) with family comedies like 'Wild Hogs' (2007), late sequels such as 'Be Cool' (2005) and voice work as the title dog in 'Bolt' (2008).

The high point of that stretch was 'Hairspray' (2007). Buried under prosthetics, he played housewife Edna Turnblad in the musical descended from John Waters' film, and danced in heels with Christopher Walken. It earned him a Golden Globe nomination and reminded everyone the man could still move.

In 2012 he shot 'Savages' with Oliver Stone and took it to San Sebastián, where the festival handed him a special Donostia Award. Four years later came his best recent work: defence lawyer Robert Shapiro in 'American Crime Story', Ryan Murphy's retelling of the O. J. Simpson trial, which won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe as a producer, on top of acting nominations at both ceremonies.

Not everything landed. 'Gotti' (2018), his biopic of the New York mob boss, collected six Razzie nominations and a notorious 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. And in 2014 he supplied one of the most replayed moments in Oscar history by introducing singer Idina Menzel as "Adele Dazeem", a slip that became an instant meme and which he took in good humour a year later.

Planes, faith and loss

He met actress Kelly Preston on the set of 'The Experts' and they married in Paris in 1991. They had three children: Jett (1992), Ella Bleu (2000) and Benjamin (2010). The family settled in Ocala, Florida, in a house built inside the Jumbolair airfield, with its own runway and a driveway designed so the planes could park at the front door.

Flying is his other life. Travolta holds pilot ratings for the Boeing 707 and 747, has served as an ambassador for Qantas and for years owned an ex-Qantas 707 he named 'Jett Clipper Ella' after his children. In 2017 he donated it to an Australian aviation museum, though by then the aircraft could no longer be certified as airworthy. It crossed the world dismantled, in the hold of a cargo ship, and reached New South Wales in May 2026.

The personal blows were brutal. On 2 January 2009 his son Jett died at sixteen during a family holiday in the Bahamas after suffering a seizure. Eleven years later, on 12 July 2020, Kelly Preston died at 57 from a breast cancer she had kept private for two years. Travolta stepped back from filming for a while to be with Ella and Benjamin.

Behind the camera at last

He returned with a run of low-budget thrillers ('Paradise City', 'Cash Out', 'High Rollers') and with a project he had been carrying around for thirty years. In 1997 he published a children's story, 'Propeller One-Way Night Coach', about a boy obsessed with aviation who crosses America on an overnight flight. In 2026 he turned it into 'Propeller: One-Way Night Coach', which he wrote, directed, narrated and produced, with Ella Bleu in the cast.

It runs barely an hour, premiered at Cannes on 15 May 2026 and reached Apple TV a fortnight later. Reviews were lukewarm, but by then that didn't seem to trouble him much. At 72, the kid who danced in Brooklyn had finally told his own story, and walked away with a Palme d'Or for his trouble.