John Travolta, the 59 year-old father and Academy Award-nominated actor, has become the epitome of a professional in his career; he has been one of Hollywood’s top male actors (and sex symbols) for over forty years, reaching a level of success that few ever do, being cast as the leading male in film after film, decade after decade.

According to him. Travolta first broke into show business at 17, when he won his first professional role after spending two summers at a theatre camp.

The Saturday Night Fever and Grease heartthrob relates that his interest in show business was borne long before his time at the camp and his first “real” acting job, however.

“I could take out the garbage and I would be heard, Travolta told The Telegraph. “I never needed to do a lot to get attention, so my performing honestly came out of joy.”

John Travolta has long-been one of the world’s most loved actors, as his humility and obvious zest for life have always been apparent, both through his personal, and professional, work.

The Pulp Fiction star says that being humble is a trait he attributes to having come by after experiencing, both, life’s greatest successes, as well as its most debilitating losses and suffering; Travolta lost his long-time girlfriend, Diana Hyland, in 1977 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Then, in January 2009, the star and his wife of twenty-three years, actress Kelly Preston, experienced the most personal and heart-wrenching tragedy a parent can imagine: their 16-year-old son, Jett, who was the spitting image of his father, passed away after having a seizure in the Bahamas.

Still, even in light of two such extremely painful events, Travolta says he has always been “a glass-half-full man…an optimist by nature.”

“I’m probably less terrified of death than your average fellow now, because people so near to me have suffered before their time and I just feel that if they can do it, so can I. The edge – the panic that most people feel – has been taken off death for me. I almost feel like it’s disrespectful to fear it when others have been able to do it.”

That perspective proved to serve the actor well, when, a year after Jett’s death, Travolta and Preston learned that they were expecting their third child; son Benjamin, now three, was born in November 2010.

Travolta now says he has his life back on track after two years of angst and torment over Jett’s untimely death, and contributes his positive outlook today to Scientology, the religion he has been practicing since 1975.

Travolta has taken a hiatus from acting for the last several years, staying almost entirely out of the public eye; now, however, Danny Zuko is back, playing a husband who suffers from memory loss after a car accident opposite Salma Hayek in the film, A Three Dog Life, based on the best-selling memoir by Abigail Thomas. The movie is being produced by screenplay adapter, Nick Guthe, and J. Todd Harris and Clark Peterson; The Solution Entertainment is currently looking for a buyer of the film in the European Film Market.

In A Three Dog Life, Travolta will play the amnesiac husband of Abigail Thomas (Salma Hayek), a far cry from the villainous roles he has become so well-known for, and that he is still enjoying playing; he says that his quest for the bad-guy roles will probably continue until the day he gets to play such a character in a James Bond movie.

He told The Telegraph that his still-unachieved goal will prevent him from really being able to “close the chapter on playing villains” until he is cast in a Bond.

“I would love that,” he says. “They’re going a different way with their villain in this next film but I’ve spoken to Barbara Broccoli [James Bond producer] about it and she loves the idea, so that would be great.”

Main image courtesy Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.