In last month's Get Shorty, he won raves as gangster-turned-Hollywood player Chili Palmer; in early December he stars in White Man's Burden, a dark look at race relations; in March he'll play a fighter pilot in Broken Arrow, the highly anticipated action movie directed by John Woo and co-starring Christian Slater. Next year will be just as hectic: He is already filming Phenomenon, in which he plays a man of below-average intelligence who turns into a genius overnight. He'll follow this with the Nora Ephron-helmed comedy Michael, about a womanizing, boozing angel who lands in the Midwest, and then, perhaps, he'll do another comedy, called Thirty Six Names, with Sharon Stone.

And besides, Travolta lives well because he can. For one thing, he's been wealthy for years, having made a fortune from a cut of the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks. For another, his fee has gone from a paltry $140,000 for Pulp Fiction (on which he lost money, paying his own out-of-pocket expenses to relocate his family and various staff to L.A. for the shoot) to $5 million for Get Shorty to a reported $10 million for Michael.

Travolta's rise (beginning with Welcome Back, Kotter in 1975) and fall (the Two of a Kind and Staying Alive years) and rise (1989's Look Who's Talking) and fall (Shout) and rise yet again (Pulp Fiction) have made him a 41-year-old, well-documented icon, albeit with a mysterious streak. His penchants for flying and for practicing Scientology are common knowledge; exactly what he did during those years we didn't see him onscreen is not. It would be wrong, however, to assume that he ever crumbled during the career slumps. “John has a self-confidence about himself,” says Shorty director Barry Sonnenfeld. “I don't think he feels any differently about himself now than he did during the Perfect and Look Who's Talking days. He loves being a movie star, but not in a 'I need a bigger camper' way. He just loves it in a good way.”