John Travolta - The Evolution of A Hollywood Movie Star's Style from Western Themes to Modern Day and More
60"You're the one that I love!"
John Travolta is a name and face everyone knows—one of Hollywood’s leading men, with a long and prestigious filmography stretching four decades. But if you’re a Travolta fan, or even just tend to gather trivia, you already know Travolta got his start not in the movies, but on television. While he had already performed on Boadway, and in bit parts in various films, it was Travolta’s role in ABC’s “Welcome Back Kotter” that catapulted him to superstar status, and made him a sex symbol.
The late nineteen seventies were when Travolta reigned supreme, starring in two of the best known and most iconic films of the decade in as many years—Saturday Night Fever, as any good Travolta trivia gatherer will tell you, won Travolta the nomination for Best Actor in the 1977 Oscars, while his iconic role of Danny Zuko in Grease wearing leather jackets , the next year, won him great acclaim.
But Travolta’s career slumped after the seventies, as the same trivia will point out. Urban Cowboy was admittedly a hit, but after that, John Travolta wearing all types of styles including straw hats acted in a large number of commercial flops, while also rejecting roles in movies that went on to do very well at the box-office—it seemed, in effect, that his career was done for. While Look Who’s Talking was a hit, it was considered a fluke of sorts, being very different from what was considered the ‘typical’ Travolta film.
It would be fair to say that John Travolta was in fact reinvented from the ground up by Quentin Tarantino, for what might just be Tarantino’s best film—Pulp Fiction, in which he played a role as iconic and unmistakably Travolta as any of his roles in the Seventies. Travolta received his second Oscar nomination for his role in the film, and re-emerged as a leading man. He has since played the protagonist in films like Get Shorty, the anti-hero in Swordfish, and a role very different indeed from anything he has ever done in the musical, Hairspray.
