In the years following "Grease," Olivia Newton-John starred in the infamous 1980 flop and eventual cult fav "Xanadu" but spent the decades largely focused on her singing career, until her death in 2022. John Travolta was and remains the most famous "Grease" alumnus, but his career following his late-'70s boom period has evolved into a case study of extreme highs (1994's "Pulp Fiction") and lows (2000's "Battlefield Earth," 2018's "Gotti").
Right around the time "Pulp Fiction" provided Travolta with an against-type performance that served as a comeback story for his career, Stockard Channing made 1993's barely seen "Six Degrees of Separation" starring Will Smith in the nascent phase of his movie stardom. Channing garnered an Oscar nomination for her credulous New York socialite (very much the opposite of Rizzo), but weirdly enough, the film's been largely forgotten by history.
Channing had her own TV show — literally titled "The Stockard Channing Show" — for a single season in 1980, but for the most part, she worked regularly in film, television, and theater throughout the '80s and '90s, with supporting roles in high-profile projects like 1998's "Practical Magic" and 1996's "The First Wives Club" probably standing as her most notable on-screen endeavors of the era. She racked up Emmy nominations, but mostly for projects that aren't widely remembered here in the 2020s. Channing wouldn't approach her "Grease"-level fame ... again until the end of the '90s.
