Kylie Minogue

‘The Point Of My Job Is To Entertain And Make It Look Easy. It’s The Parts You Don’t See Which Make Me Feel Proud… The Fears I Have To Face And Overcome’

- Michelle Davies

Her career has spanned four decades in music and TV, with endless reinventions. But what makes this star special is her ability to bounce back from hardships and heartbreak

It was the summer of 1978, and in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, Carol Minogue was wrestling with a dilemma. Her seven-year-old daughter Dannii was a stage school attendee and desperate to go to an audition at a casting agency that was looking for child actors. But if she took her, there was nobody to look after her other kids, Kylie, ten, and Brendan, eight. ‘Eventually, I wore her down and she agreed to take me on the condition that Brendan and Kylie came along too, just to make it fair,’ Dannii later revealed. ‘Then Kylie got cast [instead].’ The idea of the eldest Minogue sister becoming a star stunned everyone – until that point, her only interest in entertainment was learning to play the piano. But her breakthrough role as a Dutch orphan in The Sullivans, a drama series set in World War II, put her on theroad to a 40-year career and has seen her amass over 80 million record sales worldwide. Now 50, and second only to Madonna in terms of image reinvention, Minogue is set to spend 2019 touring on the back of her country and western inspired album Golden – her sixth album to hit number one. ‘I had no idea music would become my life, I thought acting would be my path,’ she said.

Born Kylie Ann Minogue on 28 May 1968 in Melbourne, her mother Carol was a former stage dancer and her father, Ron, an accountant. After her eight-episode run on The Sullivans, Minogue’s next role was on a show called Skyways, where a certain Jason Donovan was cast as her older brother. Her first recollection of him was that he was ‘really chubby with a bowl haircut’, but the pair would later go on to become both on- and off-screen lovers.