She tweeted: “Please say a prayer for him!”
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Her father, who had stage 4 cancer, passed away the night before Grease: Live! was set to broadcast live on Fox.
Hudgens revealed her father’s ongoing battle with cancer last August during her acceptance speech at the Industry Dance Awards for her Breakthrough Performer award. “Thank you to everyone who kept him in your prayers”, she wrote. Few hours before her performance she tweeted, ‘Tonight, I do the show in his honor’.
“My dad has just been recently diagnosed with stage four cancer”, she said at the time.
“Grease is one of the movies that made me want to be an entertainer, and I have literally been waiting my whole life to play Sandy”, she told Entertainment Weekly.
The real star of Grease: Live! – other than Aaron Tveit’s various body parts – was definitely Vanessa Hudgens, who leapt from her High School Musical pastinto what’s definitely going to be a star-studded future. “I hate cancer with every cell of my being”.
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Julianne said that Olivia Newton-John-who played Sandy in the original film version-gave her blessing for the dancer to play the character on television, which helped Julianne’s years-long dream come true. She explains, “It’s adding camerawork, it’s adding a different level of choreography and just all these new challenges that I find really exciting”. For her to give me that blessing to take that wave, I hope I make her proud.
