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John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an Academy Award-nominated,
Golden Globe Award-winning American actor and singer. He established his career as
a leading Hollywood actor with films such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
Travolta enjoyed a career revival in the 1990s, stemming from his role in Pulp
Fiction.
Travolta, youngest of six children, was born in Englewood, New Jersey, to Salvatore
Travolta, a second-generation Italian American semi-professional football player
turned tire salesman, and Helen Cecilia Burke, an Irish American
 Career
After
dropping out of Dwight Morrow High School after his junior year, Travolta
moved to New York City to get a job as a performer. He landed roles in the
touring company of Grease (musical) and on Broadway in Over Here! singing the
Sherman Brothers' song "Dream Drummin'.'" Travolta also cut singles for a
local record company, but the songs were quickly forgotten. But eventually, he
moved to Los Angeles to further his career in show business.
Travolta's first television role was as a fall victim in Emergency! in 1973, but
his first major movie role as Billy Nolan, a sadistic bully who taunted Sissy
Spacek's Carrie White in the horror film Carrie (1976). Around the same time he
landed his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino in the TV sitcom Welcome Back,
Kotter (1975–1979) in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared (as
Arnold Horshack's mother).
Travolta in one of his earliest roles, in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
(1976)Around this time he also had a hit single entitled "Let Her In" peaking at
number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the next few years, he appeared in
some of his most memorable screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977)
and as Danny Zuko in Grease (1978). His mother and his sister Ann appeared as
extras in Saturday Night Fever and his sister Ellen appeared as a waitress in
Grease. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album,
that eventually went on to sell more than 10 million copies. In 1980, Travolta
inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit
film, Urban Cowboy, in which he starred with Debra Winger.
After Urban Cowboy came a string of flops that sidelined his acting career. Some
suggest that he was typecast as a disco stud or 1970s icon, which could be the
reason his agent intervened on several occasions to turn down acting roles. During
that time he was offered, but turned down, lead roles in what would become box
office hits, including American Gigolo, An Officer and A Gentleman, Splash and
Fatal Attraction. The first two films ultimately starred Richard Gere in the lead
role and went to become box office successes. This was also the case much later in
his career with the movie Chicago - the role of lawyer Billy Flynn was offered to
Travolta, but ultimately was played by Gere; the film went on to become a highly
commercial and critical success. His only hit film during this period was alongside
Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis in Look Who's Talking. However, it
wasn't until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994),
for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. The
movie shifted him back onto the A-list, and he was inundated with offers.
Coincidentally, before Travolta took the role he visited Tarantino, who was living
in the same ramshackle apartment in Los Angeles that Travolta had inhabited when he
got his start. Notable roles following Pulp Fiction include a movie-buff loan shark
in Get Shorty (1995), an FBI agent in Face/Off (1997), a desperate attorney in A
Civil Action (1998) and a military detective in The General's Daughter (1999).
Travolta signing copies of Battlefield Earth, 2000 Travolta also starred in
Battlefield Earth (2000) based on a work of science fiction by L. Ron Hubbard, in
which he played the leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak
future Earth. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very
poorly at the box office. Travolta, who converted to Scientology in 1975 and
endorses Hubbard's teachings, had hoped that the film would be well received and be
the first in a series of Hubbard film adaptations. In fact, the film won a Razzie
Award for Worst Film of the Year at the 2000 awards.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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John Travolta -
Manifesting Generator - Biography
