When Olivia Newton-John brought Sandy’s first day jitters to life, she was experiencing her own.
Didi Conn, who played Sandy’s friend in the beloved 1978 film Grease, opens up to PEOPLE exclusively about working with Newton-John, who died in 2022 at age 73. Conn, 74, says that on their first day on set, Newton-John, who had found success as a singer but had limited acting experience, was anxious.
“The first scene in the movie was her scene of walking onto the campus of Rydell with Frenchy, and she was nervous,” Conn says. Part of her concern was that she was older than John Travolta, who starred as Danny Zuko, but Conn didn’t think she had to worry. “They did a screen test, and if you ever see that, she’s so beautiful, she just looked exactly ‘teenager,’ ” she says.
“So we were waiting and waiting and they’re fixing the lights and [it[ was a long shot, and they had to get it all right,” Conn says. But Conn had an idea to help her co-star calm down.
Paramount/Getty
Olivia Newton-John (center), Didi Conn (right) and the cast of ‘Grease’
“I just started to improvise. I said, ‘Oh, so you are from Australia. Tell me all about what school’s like in Australia,’ ” Conn remembers. In the movie, Newton-John’s Sandy has just come to the United States, and Frenchy, a member of the Pink Ladies, is one of the first to welcome her to her new school. “And she looked at me like, ‘Is this in the script?’ And I said, ‘Well, tell me, did you have a boyfriend in school?’ ”
“Then she just caught on because that’s who she is. And she told me that, ‘Oh my God, the boys had to go in one side and the girls in another,’ and she had to wear gloves, and she just went on and on,” Conn says. When director Randal Kleiser called action, Newton-John’s nerves were done.
“There we were so many, many, many times, she said how grateful she was that we had so much fun and that I just pulled her right into it,” Conn says. She jokes she was “a big veteran of movies” since Grease was her third, but she “loved improvising.” Because almost all the actors were “a little older” than the characters they played, they also used improv to feel their characters out when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“As soon as we got into makeup and our hair costume, I wasn’t Didi anymore, I was Frenchy,” she says. Frenchy, the sweetest of the Pink Ladies, drops out of Rydell High to go to beauty school, then drops out of beauty school after she accidentally dyes her hair pink and goes back to high school after Frankie Avalon’s Teen Angel serenades her with “Beauty School Dropout.”
So on set, Conn says, “I walked around with a comb, fixing people if they needed it, always looking for how I could make everybody as beautiful as they could be. And what it did was we were always in an improv. So when the cameras were rolling, it was just a continuation.” That cast-wide improvisation formed a friendship “that was very, very deep,” Conn says, adding, “we’re still friends to this day.”
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Conn calls Newton-John “just so sweet and beautiful,” and says they stayed close in the decades after Grease. “I lived in Malibu on the bottom of Big Rock, and she lived on the top of Big Rock, so I’d see her a lot,” she remembers. “I miss her.”
Conn reprised her role as Frenchy in 2023’s Grease 2. She also had a cameo in Fox’s 2016 Grease Live! Madison Elizabeth Lagares played a younger version of Frenchy in 2023’s Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.
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