John Travolta always squirms when he’s in a bar and a song from Saturday Night Fever comes on, said Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “Of course it makes me smile,” says Travolta, 60. “But I also have this fear that people are going to expect me to dance. Now, I don’t mind dancing, but the days of wanting to be circled by people while dancing? They’re gone.” Despite his reluctance to put on the old dancing shoes, Travolta made an exception in 1985, when he got up to waltz with Princess Diana at a White House gala dinner. He wasn’t nervous, he says, “because I’d seen her dance with [then-husband Prince] Charles, so I knew she was strong. But she looked like she was leading [Charles], and because the world was watching I thought I needed to give her certainty that I knew what to do. I put my hand in the middle of her back, brought her hand down so that it wouldn’t be so high and gave her the confidence that we would do just fine,” he says. “I felt I had taken her back to her childhood, when she had probably watched Grease—and for that moment I was her Prince Charming.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Quiz of The Week: 29 November – 5 DecemberQuiz Have you been paying attention to The Week’s news?
-
The week’s best photosIn Pictures A drive in the desert, prayers with pigeons, and more
-
The Week Unwrapped: Will drought fuel global violence?Podcast Plus why did Trump pardon a drug-trafficking president? And are romantic comedies in terminal decline?
