Didi Conn has jumped to defend classic musical Grease which is accused of being sexist over Sandy’s dramatic makeover.
The 1978 movie stars Olivia Newton-John as Sandy, a timid girl-next-door school student, and John Travolta as the cool, handsome and popular Danny.
It’s been suggested that Grease is sexist in light of the #MeToo movement with the implication that Sandy transformed her image to make herself more attractive to the object of her affections, Danny.
However, Didi – who played Sandy’s friend Frenchie – argues Sandy’s makeover was an empowering move for herself.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Didi explained: ‘It’s just the makeover show where she’s becoming more of herself.
‘She’s allowing herself to come through and it’s not so much to get her man, it’s to be who she is 100% because she ran away from the dance because he was dancing with Cha Cha and she couldn’t confront him because there was this part of herself that wanted to come out.’
Journalist Olivia Petter disagreed and responded to Didi: ‘I do think Grease is a fabulous film, so much fun and I still watch it today. I think the important thing to address when we talk about it is that this is a woman who starts the film as a completely different person to the way that she ends it.
‘The only reason she does that big transformation to this kind of plainly dressed girly girl, so to speak, into this full of attitude, leather-wearing, laissez-faire, smoking a cigarette kind of woman, is to please a man and that’s the problem with the film is that is celebrated at the end of the film and it’s only after Sandy does that, that she becomes a socially-acceptable person for Danny to date.
‘So the implication is the woman needs to change who she is to be accepted.’
It comes after Olivia defended her iconic character telling The Guardian: ‘It’s a movie. It’s a story from the Fifties where things were different. Everyone forgets that, at the end, he changes for her, too. There’s nothing deep in there about the #MeToo movement.
‘It’s just a girl who loves a guy, and she thinks if she does that, he’ll like her. And he thinks if he does that, she’ll like him. I think that’s pretty real. People do that for each other. It was a fun love story.’
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays on ITV at 6am.
