The royal memory John Travolta called the best moment of his career
John Travolta rose to prominence in the 1970s, landing his first significant movie role in Brian De Palma’s horror flick Carrie, playing the bully, Billy. The following year, the actor landed the leading role in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, which was a huge success. Soon after, he nabbed another leading musical role, playing greaser Danny Zuko in Grease, launching him to international stardom.
After a critically successful but commercially disappointing role in De Palma’s Blow Out, Travolta’s career was tainted by several more poor-performing movies. He declined many leading roles in films which would have been huge for him, such as Splash, American Gigalo, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Luckily, the late 1980s and 1990s were more fruitful for the actor, who starred in 1989’s Look Who’s Talking, a box office hit. A few years later, Travolta was cast against type in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which earned him an Academy Award nomination and resurged his career. His subsequent movies included Get Shorty, White Man’s Burden, Mad City, Face/Off, and The General’s Daughter.
Although the 1980s was a rather stale period for Travolta, there was one standout moment that he called “one of the highlights of my life” and his “best moment of the ’80s.” In 1985, the actor was invited to dinner at the White House at the request of Princess Diana, who had married Charles four years prior. Reportedly, the people’s princess had quite a big crush on Travolta, and it was her “fantasy” to dance with him.
The pair danced around the Entrance Hall to music from Saturday Night Fever and Grease. In an interview with Good Morning America, Travolta recalled, “The look on her face when I asked her to dance—she blushed. And I liked that; I thought it was very down to earth.”
The midnight blue off-the-shoulder dress that Princess Diana wore that night has been labelled the ‘Travolta Dress’ and can be seen on display in Kensington Palace. Designed by Victor Edelstein, Princess Diana also wore the velvet gown for her last official portrait photograph taken shortly before her death in 1997.
The princess also danced with talk show host Phil Donahue at a gala in Chicago. According to Donahue’s wife, Marlo Thomas, men had to meet specific requirements to dance with Princess Diana. She claimed, “They said we need a man to dance with Princess Diana, and there are three rules: a) he has to be married, b) [the wife] has to be in the room, and c) he has to be at least 6-feet tall.” Princess Diana clearly made an exception for Travolta, who did not marry Kelly Preston until 1991.
