Hollywood's hardest-working movie star, John Travolta dons a fat suit and breasts to play a housewife in his latest role, the all-singing, all-dancing musical 'Hairspray.'
LOS ANGELES — Thirty years after "Saturday Night Fever" made him a star, John Travolta is back in a Hollywood musical. Only this time he has gone back a decade and swapped the white disco suit and seedy New York nightlife for fake mink, beehive hair and the idealism of Kennedy-era Baltimore.
The movie version of the hit 2002 Broadway musical "Hairspray," itself adapted from the 1988 John Waters comedy film of the same name, sees Travolta playing Mother Edna, a plump housewife married to a doting Wilbur Turnblad (played by Christopher Walken). In the movie, Travolta plays overprotective mom to chunky high-school-girl Tracy (Nikki Blonsky), who dreams of dancing with Baltimore's best-looking teens on television's "The Corny Collins Show."