Olivia Newton-John turns her head as the grief washes over her.
It was 2014 and the late Australian music icon was fighting back tears as the cameras rolled.
Friend and Nine Entertainment Editor, Richard Wilkins, had asked her a question she didn’t want to answer.
“There was a big gulp before I asked that question, ‘Do you know what happened to Patrick?’ and a big gulp before she answered,” Wilkins recalls of their sit-down interview.
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The ‘Patrick’ Wilkins referred to was the Physical singer’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, Patrick McDermott.
The US cameraman went missing in June 2005 while on an overnight fishing trip off the Californian coast.
“There was a time when her boyfriend at the time, Patrick McDermott, went missing. There was all sorts of speculation as to what happened,” Wilkins said.
“He’d been out on a boating trip and I had an interview to do with her at her home in Malibu and I knew, and she knew, that I was going to have to ask her that question.”
McDermott and the Grammy winning performer shared a nine-year relationship before his disappearance.
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His loss was acutely felt by the Grease star, who rarely spoke about him in public.
“Are you any closer to knowing what happened?” Wilkins asked the singer as they sat next to each other on her couch at her beachside home.
“You know, this whole process, people might wonder why I haven’t said more than I’ve said, but the truth is that it’s an incredibly private thing and an incredibly devastating thing and if there was something to say, we would say it,” Newton-John replied.
She takes a moment of pause.
“There seems to be a thing in the world now where everyone thinks they’re entitled to know everybody’s business, and they think they’re entitled to know what is going on,” she continued.
“But I think there are certain things that are so painful that I don’t choose to discuss them.
“It’s just that I miss him terribly, I love him terribly, and it’s a devastating experience.”
To this day, it’s the hardest question Wilkins has ever asked.
“It wasn’t a question I wanted to ask, nor did she want to answer,” he said.
“She did it to the best of her ability, because she didn’t know what had happened. Nobody, to my knowledge, knows what happened.”
Newton-John died in August 2022 after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 73.
She died peacefully on her California ranch, surrounded by her husband John Easterling, daughter Chloe and friends, a family statement said.
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