The actor John Travolta said made him popular: “Then everybody wanted to dance with me”
As far as rises to fame go, John Travolta enjoyed one of the most impressive – and meteoric – rises up the ranks when three of his first four feature film appearances strapped the proverbial rocket to his back and launched his career into the stratosphere.
Before he went from television favourite to global superstar, the actor was best known for playing Vinnie Barbarino on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, with his silver screen bow coming in 1975 when he played a minor role in the William Shatner-fronted supernatural horror The Devil’s Rain. After that, though, he was an A-lister in an instant.
Brian De Palma’s Academy Award-nominated Carrie became an instant horror classic; Saturday Night Fever ended up as a generation touchstone that earned him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’, spawned one of the bestselling soundtracks of all time, and wound up as one of the highest-grossing R-rated releases in cinema history.
With his profile having skyrocketed, Travolta’s next move was key in establishing whether he was going to sink or swim in his newly-found fame. When that next project turned out to be the top-earning musical ever made in Grease, it would be fair to say it was mission accomplished for a performer who was still only 24 years old when the film hit cinemas.
Of course, there was eventually a downturn that was remedied by Quentin Tarantino recruiting him for Pulp Fiction, with Travolta playing a major part in bringing about his own downward trajectory following the renaissance when he was convinced that Battlefield Earth wasn’t going to end up as a studio-killing abomination.
Stardom and popularity aren’t always intertwined, though, but even if he was an established name who’d been around for decades at that point, Travolta revealed during an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show that a soiree he attended in the 1990s ended up making him feel more popular than he had in a long time when a veteran legend took him for a spin.
“I danced with Sean Connery once, you know,” he informed the host. “There was a party about ten years ago for Frank Sinatra’s, before he passed away obviously, but I was about to leave with my wife and he said, ‘John where are you going?’. And I said, ‘We got to go home, I’m going to work tomorrow morning’. He said, ‘Not before you dance with me you’re not’. But it was then everybody wanted to dance with me. After that, he made me popular.”
Connery was hardly renowned for cutting shapes or busting moves to anywhere near the same level as the guy who’d headlined Saturday Night Fever and Grease, but he must have held his own after their brief dalliance on the dancefloor suddenly had everyone clamouring to be his next partner.
