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John Travolta
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Biography
Born: John Joseph Travolta on 18 February 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, US.
John Travolta is an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor, dancer, and singer, best known for his leading roles in films such as Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Pulp Fiction, and the 2007 film Hairspray.
Travolta was born in Englewood, New Jersey, the son of Salvatore Travolta (an Italian American semi-professional football player turned tire salesman) and Helen Cecilia Burke (an Irish American actress and singer who had appeared in radio vocal group The Sunshine Sisters, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama teacher).
Travolta then moved to New York City to get a job as a performer. He landed roles in the touring company of Grease and on Broadway in Over Here!. Travolta also cut singles for a local record company, but the songs were quickly forgotten. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, California to further his career in show business.
Travolta gained his first major movie role as Billy Nolan 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 real-life sister Ellen Travolta also occasionally appeared (as Arnold Horshack's mother).
His most memorable roles came as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and as Danny Zuko in Grease (1978) at the height of the disco era. He performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album, that eventually went on to sell more than 10 million copies.
After the hit musical, came a string of flops that sidelined his acting career into unforgettable fare. It wasn't until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's cult 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.
Travolta also played a lead role in the panned Battlefield Earth (2000) (which is based on a work of pulp fiction by L. Ron Hubbard), in which he plays the leader of a group of aliens that enslave humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did poorly at the box office, winning a Razzie Award for Worst Film of the Year at the 2000 awards.
Travolta is married to fellow Scientologist and actress Kelly Preston and is the father of two children, Jett and Ella Bleu. Previously he was involved with actress Diana Hyland, who died of breast cancer in 1977.
Travolta is a qualified pilot and owns five airplanes, including a former Qantas Boeing 707-138. His house in Ocala, Florida has its own runway and taxiway right to the door.
