'Beyond the Oscar': Travolta gets surprise Cannes prize
- Last updated: May 16, 2026 | 09:26
Hollywood star John Travolta was given a surprise lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival Friday as he premiered the first movie he has ever directed.
The man who became an icon overnight with "Saturday Night Fever" was visibly moved as he accepted the honorary Palme d'Or before the screening of "Propeller One-Way Night Coach", which is based on a book about his first experience in an airliner.
"I just can't believe it. This is beyond the Oscar, really," he said as he accepted the tribute.
The festival has been laying on the love for Hollywood legends this year despite the big studios staying away, with honorary Palmes for Barbra Streisand and Peter Jackson as well as a gala screening for Vin Diesel and the stars of "The Fast and the Furious" franchise to mark its 25th anniversary.
Travolta -- who has never won an Oscar -- revived his flagging career with his iconic turn as hitman Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction", which won the festival's Palme d'Or top prize in 1994.
Many critics hailed it as his greatest performance, one that has since gone down in cinema history.
"My favourite movies in the history of my life have always been the winners of the Palme d'Or," Travolta said.
Behind the camera
Cannes had kept the award under wraps until the actor walked on stage for the premiere wearing a black suit and a white beret.
The 72-year-old said he had been hugely surprised to have his directorial debut, which stars his daughter Ella Bleu as an air hostess, accepted at the world's most prestigious film festival.
When Cannes director Thierry Fremaux told him in November that "it would be the first film ever accepted that early I cried like a baby," he said.
"I had no expectation my film would be accepted," he added.
"Propeller One-Way Night Coach" is a one-hour self-financed autobiographical tale about Travolta's flight as an eight-year-old with his actress mother from New York to Los Angeles in 1962.
"This is the blueprint of my life," said the actor, a lifelong aeroplane nut, who narrates the story.
"What you'll see in the movie is completely my perspective on what I witnessed people go through.
"Everyone that was in the movie is sitting in the audience right there, my family," he added.
Travolta was bitten by the acting bug early.
Born in New Jersey to the an Irish mother and an Italian-American father who ran a tyre store, he left school at 16 to try his hand at acting and dancing.
Two years later he landed his first big stage role in the Broadway musical "Grease".
He was nominated for an Oscar in 1978 for playing disco-dancing champion Tony Manero in the low-budget "Saturday Night Fever" and was launched into the Hollywood stratosphere by his role in the movie version of "Grease" the same year.
The rights to "Propeller One-Way Night Coach" have been bought by Apple, Travolta said.
Asked if he would direct again, he said he had watched all sorts of directors as an actor.
"I really believe that I can navigate around all of that, and anything I would choose to do, but I really feel I have to have passion about the material to do again what I've done here," he said.
Agence France-Presse