Hmm, the Boeing or the Learjet?

John Travolta collects planes like most people collect cars. Instead of a garage he has a hangar and instead of a driveway he has a private runway at the bottom of his garden from where he takes off in either his customised £2m Boeing 707, one of his three Gulfstream jets or his Learjet. He has even called his 15-year-old son Jett.

It is a passion he says he can trace back to childhood when he was growing up in New Jersey: “I would sit in my back yard and watch airliners fly over the house,” he recalls. “I would sometimes be able to tell whether they were TWA or Eastern Airlines and admire the shape and design. Even then, I knew that I wanted to fly a plane. But how was I ever going to do it?”

The answer was by becoming a multi-millionaire film star and one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood in a career that has spanned more than three decades.

Background

• Hairspray

• Hairspray - Sunday Times Review

• Hairspray, review of the 1988 film

• Travolta as you've never seen him

• Obituary of Divine

On the move: John Travolta

John Travolta talks about his career, his huge carbon footprint and playing a woman

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

But in these environmentally friendly times it is a passion that has irked a few and hardly sits comfortably with other Hollywood stars eager to turn up at awards ceremonies in hybrid Toyota Priuses. It was recently calculated that Travolta has been responsible for about 800 tons of carbon emissions over the past year (around 100 times more than the average person accumulates through flying).

To his credit, Travolta doesn’t skirt around the issue. “I’m probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets,” he said recently.

And it’s not just his planes that mark him out as something of an eco-rebel. Along with the planes goes his car collection.

“I had to content myself with cars before I could ever contemplate owning a plane,” he says. “My first, in 1974, was a 1962 Oldsmobile. I had some minor TV work, got paid and wanted to get on the road. It was a small step to what I wanted to achieve.”

Travolta lists his motors without embarrassment. There’s a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes SL 500 and Jaguar XJ6. “But my favourites are my classic Thunderbirds,” he says. “I have a 55, 56 and 57 Thunderbird – American Fords in the great old tradition. I love the fact that they could achieve speed and distance with such style. I don’t use them for long journeys any more, but to just enjoy the drive.”

There is no doubt that Travolta revels in the luxuries afforded him by his fame: as well as the house-cum-terminal in Florida there are other sumptuous homes in Maine and California and a blonde actress wife, Kelly Preston, 44. Evidently he eats well, too: his 14st 2lb frame is a far cry from the lean physique he sported in his early films such as Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978).

His latest role in a remake of the classic 1960s stage musical and 1980s film Hairspray, released here on Friday, sees him piling on even more pounds. He plays a fat woman, Edna Turnblad, with 30lb of prosthetics, a wig and make-up that took five hours to ladle on each morning.

It wasn’t the most obvious role for him. “I was reluctant to play Edna,” he admits. “I have spent 30 years playing macho men. When I was asked, I said, ‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ I was finally persuaded that it would be a great musical and it lives up to those expectations. It was fun to do and fun to watch.”

By accepting the role, however, Travolta has flown straight into a new barrage of controversy. Gay activists in America have accused him of being a hypocrite and homophobic for taking on what they describe as an “iconic gay role” while belonging to the Church of Scientology, which they claim rejects homosexuals and lesbians.

“There is nothing gay in this movie,” says Travolta, somewhat wearily. “I am not playing a gay man, I am playing a woman. And, in any case, I am certainly not homophobic and Scientology does not ban gay people. I just have to challenge such criticism and move on.”

Still, a little controversy may help the film at the box office, where Travolta’s track record has been mixed. For every Pulp Fiction, the film that revived his flagging career in the 1990s, there have been two turkeys. Remember Look Whose Talking and its two sequels, often derided as the worst trilogy of all time? Or even Wild Hogs, the biker buddy film released this summer that was panned by the critics.

He remains upbeat about his career, however: “My glass has always been half full rather than half empty,” he says. “People have tried to beat that enthusiasm out of me, but it doesn’t work. I could give you many examples of things that have turned to s*** for me. But if I gave in to cynicism, that would be it. I would give up.”

And as well as the money to indulge his boyhood fantasies, his career has enabled him to work with the women he says he most admires, from Halle Berry (“so beautiful, she is like a freak of nature”) to Olivia Newton-John (“the high school girlfriend you fell in love with”) and Uma Thurman (“exotic with an intelligent sexuality”).

He gives a wide smile: “You’d be happy to fly or drive with any of those women. I have been a lucky guy. Haven’t I?”

On his CD changer

Anything from the 1960s. I have the latest album from Sergio Mendes, at the moment. He has taken 1960s music and invited people such as the Black Eyed Peas to record it