"A Love Song for Bobby Long," a Southern Gothic tale about loss and love and family set in New Orleans.

"Bobby Long" has awards aspiration written all over it, but successful in this quest or not, it marks a shift for Travolta. Tony is where he has been, the genesis of almost every role that has brought him success — all versions of the streetwise, sexy dude who has the looks and the moves if not the brains. Bobby Long, a man straight out of Tennessee Williams, is where Travolta says he hopes to go — characters played from the inside out, characters with more substance than attitude.

I was going to include the rather extensive article in the Los Angeles Times today
about John Travolta:"A Flier Not Content To Just Glide"  By Mary McNamara, but in checking some background material I came across the Biography below.  It has more substance, insight, and helped me put John in better perspective.

Born: 18 February 1954
Where: Englewood, New Jersey, USA
Awards: Won 2 Golden Globes, Nominated for 2 Oscars, 1 BAFTA
Height: 6' 2"

When John Travolta stepped up to play the Bill Clinton character in the true-to-life political drama "Primary Colours", there was a life parallel.  Clinton was known as The Comeback Kid and Travolta, in the previous four years, had achieved a return to prominence rarely paralleled in cinema's history. Having in the late Seventies been the biggest star on the planet, he'd spent the Eighties in a deep hole beneath the gutter. Now, suddenly, by an outrageous fluke of timing, he was a $20 million man, capable of carrying mediocre movies over the $100 million mark - a producer's dream.

Italian-Irish John Joseph Travolta was born on the 18th of February, 1954, in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore, was a semi-pro footballer turned tyre salesman. His mother, Helen, was the entertainer in the family. She had played in a radio vocal group called The Sunshine Sisters, and had acted and directed before becoming a high school drama teacher. John also had five brothers and sisters - Joey and Sam, and Ellen, Ann and Margaret. All of them have worked in TV, film or music. This clearly had much to do with Helen's influence, but also Salvatore's who encouraged his children by assembling a small theatre in the family's basement.

Young John was very quick to make his career choice. His great loves all pointed him towards a life onstage. He loved The Beatles, and learned to play guitar. He loved to dance, winning a Twist competition at a very young age. And he loved James Cagney. So enamoured was he of acting that little Bone (so called because he was so skinny) actually joined an Actor's Workshop at age 12. Employing all his talents, he played in local musicals and worked in dinner theatre. He took tap lessons from Gene Kelly's brother, Fred, and picked up all the new steps from the groundbreaking TV show Soul Train. It wasn't all work. He rough-housed with the rest - that famous nose of his was originally broken while larking about in the pool. But, as said, his childhood hobbies were a preparation for what was to come.

At 16, with his parents' blessing, he dropped out of High School and went to live with sister Ann in Manhattan, aiming to break into theatre (he'd already acted in summer stock). And - financing himself by working as a cashier, a luggage handler and a ticket collector - He did all manner of off-Broadway parts as he struggled for experience -including "Grease", but touring in a minor role.

Then, in 1975, came the first big break, when he was cast as Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back Kotter, a huge hit. This inevitably brought film roles.

In "The Boy In The Plastic Bubble", the tale of a young man confined to a virus-proof environment by a deficiency of his immune system. This was a touching movie, with Travolta performing well. It also saw him begin a relationship with his co-star, Diana Hyland, an actress 18 years his senior who played his mother in the movie. This was love, and for a short while Travolta's life must have seemed like a cakewalk. He had his soul-mate. He had a pop career, enjoying a Top 20 single with "Let Her In" in 1977 and three hit albums (he actually won a Billboard Award for Best Male Vocals for "Travolta Fever").

Then came "Saturday Night Fever". Here he was Tony Manero - shop assistant by day, disco king by night - and he was fantastic. Frustrated, alienated, thuggish, sweet and, Christ, what a dancer. The movie was a genuine phenomenon, with Travolta Oscar-nominated and, better still, a full-blown Seventies icon.

Yet, just as all was going so fabulously well, life dealt him a hammer-blow. In 1977, the year Saturday Night Fever was released, Diana Hyland died of cancer, in Travolta's arms. It was a tragedy, accentuated by his mother's death a year later.

After a five year slim spell, things changed. It was the spawniest slice of good fortune. It's often said that Travolta was saved by Quentin Tarantino  And that's so. But Tarantino only cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction because Michael Madsen chose to appear in Kevin Costner's epic Wyatt Earp instead. So, Madsen's bitter loss (and he is hilariously bitter about it) was Travolta's gain.

Accepting a mere $140,000 for his services, his Vincent Vega was a brilliantly jovial partner for born-again assassin Samuel L. Jackson. Once again he was Oscar-nominated.

More hits followed. There was the Hollywood gangster comedy Get Shorty (for which he won a Golden Globe): he was impressively mean in John Woo's explosive Broken Arrow: he managed to carry Phenomenon, and the cute Michael: then there was more pyrotechnics, with Nicholas in Woo's Face/Off: then Primary Colours and, proving his re-found status, a place in the all-star cast of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. And it got even better. With his name now firmly above the titles, Travolta enjoyed major success with both A Civil Action (as a flashy lawyer busting polluters) and The General's Daughter, tracking down a killer in the military.

And all this despite an incredible knack for turning down prime roles. 1997 alone saw him miss out on Good Will Hunting, Jackie Brown and As Good As It Gets. Nothing new, really. At the beginning of his career, by turning down Splash, Days Of Heaven, American Gigolo and An Officer And A Gentleman, he inadvertently helped launch both Tom Hanks and, especially, Richard Gere.

Yet, having won it all back, Travolta then faced another struggle - to keep his position, which became a struggle with Battlefield Earth, written by L. Ron Hubbard. After this setback, Travolta tried again with Swordfish, but this did not fare much better. Then came Domestic Disturbance which saw him as a divorcee whose child accuses stepdad Vince Vaughn of being a psycho criminal.

Next was "Basic", where Samuel Jackson played a tough and thoroughly unpopular sergeant on a military base in Panama, but, perhaps because the US were presently involved in a real war in Iraq, it stiffed at the US box office.

He didn't improve his situation by turning down the role of lawyer Billy Flynn in the money-spinning, Oscar-winning "Chicago", which coincidentally broke the $100 million barrier in the week of "Basic's" release. That role was then taken by - yes, you've guessed it- Richard Gere.

Battling to regain his footing in the industry, Travolta now went populist. "Ladder 49" - firefighters being hard currency after the events of 9/11. Then he stepped onto the comic-book bandwagon with "The Punisher" (an earlier version, starring Dolph Lundgren, had actually been in the vanguard of this new wave of comic adaptations).

Perhaps Ladder 49 and The Punisher would pull Travolta back up again after his second fall from grace. Or maybe that would be done by two other projects in the pipeline. 2003 saw rumours abound that he would reprise his role as Chili Palmer in Get Shorty 2. And then there is Tarantino who, would complete Kill Bill then throw himself into The Vega Brothers, a prequel to both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, that would see Travolta and Michael Madsen reappearing as Vincent and Vic Vega respectively.

In the meantime, Travolta is enjoying life amongst the prime movers. Back in 1989, while filming The Experts, he met actress Kelly Preston. She was married at the time and, when that ended, she saw George Clooney (she was also briefly engaged to Charlie Sheen). But Travolta was due a break in love, and the pair re-met and were married in September, 1991. The couple have two children, son Jett and daughter Ella Bleu.

Travolta still loves dancing, and music, and he loves to fly jets, owning at least four.
Has a very lovely house in Florida he lives half the year, that has a 707 parked  in one 'garage", and a  Gulfstream in another!

Dominic Wills

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/
film/biographies/john_travolta_biog/6