Tributes have been paid to Olivia Newton-John, the iconic pop singer of the 1970s and 80s who has died aged 73 at her home in southern California.

She was most famous for her starring role as Sandy Olsson alongside John Travolta’s Danny Zuko in the 1978 musical Grease and had been battling cancer for three decades.

Newton-John was Jewish in her maternal line: she was the daughter of Brinley Newton-John and Irene Born, the daughter of Max Born, a Jewish Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

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Max Born was a friend of Albert Einstein who moved to England after being suspended from his position at a German university by the Nazi regime, a move that likely saved his life. There, his wife worked to help Jewish refugee women find employment.

Doreen Berger from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain added: “The original name of this distinguished German family, originating in Lissa in Germany, was Buttermilch.

“Irene’s mother, the mathematician, Hedwig Ehrenberg, was the a descendant of the German jurist, Rabbi Philipp Ehrenberg.”

Newton-John’s father, meanwhile, was an MI5 officer who took part in the Enigma project at Bletchley Park and took Rudolph Hess into custody during the Second World War.

After her parents’ divorce, her mother made a new life in Melbourne,…