We look back on Kylie Minogue’s fabulous career and the heartaches from Jason Donovan to Joshua Sasse that shaped her

IT'S ALMOST unbelievable. Kylie Minogue, the girl we’ve known since she burst on to our TV screens as Charlene in Neighbours way back in 1986, is about to celebrate her 50th birthday.

We’ve watched her become both a national treasure and one of our most enduring sex symbols as she’s released hit after hit, won countless awards, reinvented herself several times over, survived breast cancer, suffered heartbreak and single-handedly made gold hot pants the hottest item of clothing known to woman.

Louise has known Kylie since the late eightiesBut for all we might think we know about Kylie, she’s not quite everything she seems.

I first met her in the London offices of PWL Records, run by Pete Waterman. It was 1987 – just weeks before Kyliemania would explode with the now pop classic I Should Be So Lucky – and she was everything a girl-next-door celebrity should be: cute, sunny and eager to please.

She patiently waited for me to work out how to use my tape recorder (I was also new to the job), and we bonded over our shared star sign (Gemini) and which hair products were best to straighten our frizzy hair. She was so oblivious to how famous she was about to become, she told me she was living in a hotel and didn’t dare unpack her bags because she thought she may have to go back home to Australia any minute. Three decades later, that has yet to happen.

Since then I have met and interviewed Kylie many times. She remembers little details about my kids and always laughs at me because I’m obsessed with her finding Mr Right (“I’ve dated lots of Mr Rights!”).

And while she makes her boundaries very clear and you will never get her to gossip, I’ve got to know a little bit more about the woman who – despite living her whole adult life in the spotlight – has always managed to keep her real self very private.

In public she is, without fail, sweet, charming and completely professional. But there is steel in that megawatt smile and pure grit behind those big blue eyes. Kylie is not a woman who became rich and famous through sheer luck. Ask anyone who works on her tours and they will tell you she always learns everyone’s names and knows the lighting technicians’ jobs almost as well as they do.

With her dancers she is strict. She’s told me: “No one is tougher on me than I am on myself and I expect it of others. If anyone is messing around, I don’t scream, I don’t shout, but I give them a look and they know exactly what it means. Everyone is aware if they are not doing the job they will get ‘the look’.”

She is smart and disciplined, speaks French and Spanish, has never been to rehab and has amassed a £50million fortune, with luxury homes in Australia, England and France. She has – as she will always remind you – been written off several times in her career, but she has always hung in there, always come back.

“You can’t expect people just to stick with you forever,” she says. “You need to give them a reason, you need to make yourself relevant again. You just accept the lights have gone off and you sit and you rethink, you go out and look for good songs and do something to reinvent yourself – it happens to all of us, in every walk of life. You just have to keep the head up, smile on and be ready.”

In private, Kylie is a good laugh and a woman’s woman. Whatever the rumours about sibling rivalry with Dannii, it was her little sister who was there throughout her cancer treatment. And when Simon Cowell ungallantly exposed his affair with former X Factor judge Dannii in his book, Kylie took him to task, saying dismissively: “He doesn’t need to do those things. Or maybe he does. Who knows?”

Ask her how she’s kept her remarkably youthful appearance and she’ll cite her favourite Jane Fonda quote: “A percentage of her looks is down to genes, a percentage down to taking care of herself and a percentage down to her surgeon. She doesn’t apologise and shouldn’t have to.

"I’m not against surgery, as long as it’s well done and someone hasn’t gone too far.”

And although she is more of a herbal tea girl, Kylie is completely capable of drinking you under the table – especially if we’re talking margaritas. She’s had many a wild night out in the company of her closest buddies, who include Dannii, the author Kathy Lette and stylist and photographer Will Baker. She curses like a trooper (“I’m an Aussie, what do you expect?”), and I’ve personally seen her dancing on the table more than once. But I’ve never seen her fall flat on her face.

“If anyone ever asked me to describe my job, I would tell them I’m a high-heel stuntwoman,” she once told me after mounting a bucking bronco in sky-high stilettos. “I swear it’s my greatest skill.”

The idea that Kylie is the eternal Bridget Jones, unlucky in love and desperate for marriage, is one she’s long joked about in private.

“For some reason people seem to think I’m very conventional and that all I’ve ever wanted is to be married,” she’s told me in the past. “I’m very unconventional. I couldn’t do what I do if I wasn’t. I was never one of those kids that dreamed of wedding dresses. I had very different dreams – I just wanted to travel the world and to perform.”

I’ve talked to Kylie several times about many of the men she’s dated, from the Spanish model Andrés Velencoso to the French actor Olivier Martinez and her ex-fiancé Joshua Sasse, who she split from a year ago. She has been madly in love with every one of them and incredibly sad after each break-up, but she’s never had any regrets and always been certain she would meet someone else.

“I love being in relationships,” she has told me. “But I have learnt from each and every one of them, good and bad. I think I’m lucky to have had the relationships I’ve had. What I am is a serial monogamist. I love my freedom, but don’t make me feel penned in or I will become a wild animal.”

I know she was heartbroken when she ended her engagement to Joshua, but I also know she’s relieved they split before they actually tied the knot. An eternal romantic, Kylie got her blueprint for a relationship from her parents, Ron and Carol. She has always told friends that if she couldn’t have a marriage as watertight as theirs, she would rather be single. Since her split with Josh, she’s gone on a few discreet dates and was even spotted kissing her ex Olivier.

The only lie Kylie has ever told me is that she would be happy to go out with a middle-aged man with a paunch and a balding head. Kylie has never dated anyone less than a 10. She has a type, and that type is tall, dark and handsome. They don’t need to be rich, but they do need to be romantic.

“I am a complete sucker for romance,” she has said many times. “I like all the fun bits in relationships – the flowers, the walks in the rain, the weekends away, the long-distance phone calls.”

It is perhaps why her relationships only ever tend to last for a few years.For all the many loves in her life, no one has come close to the wild, charismatic Michael Hutchence. In 1989, I walked into the VIP area of Browns nightclub in Covent Garden, and there was Kylie with the INXS frontman.

Their highly charged affair marked the end of Kylie’s relationship with clean-cut Jason Donovan, sparking a sexual awakening that was the catalyst for her reinvention from girl next door to sex siren.

Michael made her bunk off work for the first time ever, taking her on the Orient Express, where they ate, drank and spent a lot of time in their luxury cabin over several weeks. It’s an adventure she still talks about today.

I remember bumping into them again in a gallery, and for the few moments they took their eyes off each other to talk, neither could stop smiling. “Michael has changed every aspect of my life,” she gushed. “He’s opened up my mind and I feel like I’ve just started living.”

Even now, more than two decades after his death in 1997, Kylie still smiles whenever his name is mentioned. “I was privileged just to know him,” she told me. “Michael will always be special.”

The singer feels a genuine sorrow that she’s not had children (“It has just never happened for me and I’m having to accept that”), but she’s besotted with her younger brother Brendan’s boys James and Charles, and Dannii’s son Ethan, seven. Dannii has told me they all “completely adore” their auntie Kylie. “She is a massive part of their lives. She is absolutely at her most relaxed hanging out with them.”

The real passion in Kylie’s life, though, has always been work. It has helped her recover from every heartbreak, and it was her desire to get back onstage, along with round-the-clock support from her family, that got her through her battle with breast cancer in 2005. Her Showgirl tour, which was postponed following her diagnosis, resumed in November 2006.

“Having cancer changed me,” she told me years later. “It made me very human. Women would come up to me in the street and just hug me and talk about what they had gone through.

“I knew what it was like to be frightened of going in the shower because your hair would fall out, I knew how it was to feel sick and flattened and I knew what it was like to beg your doctor to let you stop taking the medication because it makes you feel so wretched.

“And then I knew what it was like to come through it, to stand back on a stage and to give hope to other women. You can get through it. We can get through this together.”

May 28 is Kylie’s very special day, and if there’s one woman who can prove you can be absolutely fabulous at 50, it’s her. And don’t expect her to put that famously pert bottom – currently on display in her 2018 calendar – away just yet.

Sitting in the sunshine one day, she told me: “I always think: ‘Put away the hot pants’, and then… something will happen.

“My bottom is its own entity. I think of it as something entirely separate to me. The Bottom. Probably the reason for it looking like it does is that I’ve spent most of my adult life dancing around in very high heels. High heels are very bad for the back, but they are great for the thighs and the butt. So thank you Mr Louboutin and Mr Choo.”

And happy birthday, Miss Minogue.