Actors - John Travolta

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	Actors - John Travolta

John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an Academy Award nominated American actor and singer.

Biography

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. But eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, California to further his career in show business.

Travolta gained his first major movie role as Billy Nolan, a sadistic classmate 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, now married to actor Jack Bannon, also occasionally appeared (as Arnold Horshack's mother).

Around this time he also had a hit single called "Let Her In", peaking at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. 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 forgettable 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. Ironically, before Travolta took the role, he had first visited Tarantino who was living in a ramshackle apartment in Los Angeles, the same apartment that Travolta had been living in when he got his start. Among other notable roles following Tarantino's film include a movie buff loan shark in Get Shorty
(1995), a role Travolta reprised in Be Cool
(2005), a traumatized father in Face/Off
(1997), a desperate attorney in A Civil Action
(1998) and a military detective in The General's Daughter
(1999).

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. Travolta, who is a Scientologist (converted 1975) and idolizes the late L. Ron Hubbard, had hoped that the film would be well-received and be the first in a series of Hubbard film adaptations. Contrary to these expectations the film was poorly received and won a Razzie Award for Worst Film of the Year at the 2000 awards.

His affiliation with Scientology has caused some controversy. In 1998 he was named in a lawsuit involving a former member who claimed that he was promised that his homosexuality could be cured. The lawsuit alleged that the organization frequently cited Travolta as proof that the organization could in fact change a person's sexual orientation. A lawyer for Travolta replied, "This looks like complete hogwash. Travolta is a happily married man, which proves he isn't gay" (see ).

Questions have also been raised regarding what kind of agreements were made between Travolta and then President Bill Clinton, regarding how Travolta would portray Clinton in the movie Primary Colors
and whether Clinton would pressure the German government to remove its ban on Scientology. Travolta was quoted about the issue in May 1998 issue of George magazine:

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for John Travolta ]

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Actors - John Travolta

Biography

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