Even during his hiatus, Travolta was always “a glass-half-full man”, he says, “an optimist by nature”. He took care never to lose the joy that director had seen in him as a 17 year-old – a joy that should by rights have been drained away by now, not by the various celebrity torments he has been subjected to over the course of his career – the lawsuits, extortion plots and unending media speculation about his sexuality – but by the series of tragic losses the actor has experienced in his lifetime. First there was his long-term girlfriend Diana Hyland, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and nursed through a long battle with breast cancer until her death in 1977. Then in 2009 Travolta and his wife of 23 years, actress Kelly Preston, lost their autistic son, Jett, after the 16 year-old suffered a seizure and hit his head on the bath at the family’s holiday home in the Bahamas. “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,” he admits today. “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.”