How Kylie Minogue went from girl next door to pop sex bomb
IT is three decades since Kylie Minogue burst on to the pop scene with hit I Should Be So Lucky.
Since then the 49-year-old singer and actress has sold 80million records.
Here, GRANT ROLLINGS reveals 30 things you didn’t know about her.
1. Producers Stock Aitken & Waterman forgot Kylie was flying into London to record at their studio. They quickly dreamt up some material and wrote I Should Be So Lucky in 40 minutes as she waited outside, with Mike Stock penning the lyrics. Thirty years on, Kylie took to Instagram to mark her musical milestone.
2. Her debut album, Kylie, went on to sell more than two million copies.
3. As a youngster, Kylie’s musical efforts had been overshadowed by sister Dannii, who appeared regularly on the Australian show Young Talent Time, while Kylie was rejected by the programme.
4. It was only after Kylie got up to sing the Carole King song The Locomotion at a charity event with the Neighbours cast in 1987 that she was signed by a record label. A cover of the song became her debut hit.
5. The former child TV performer was considering giving up acting when she was cast as Charlene in a revamp aimed at halting a dramatic slump in Neighbours’ viewing figures.
6. Twenty million British viewers watched the episode of the soap where Charlene married Jason Donovan’s mullet-haired character Scott Robinson.
7. Off screen, there was a true romance between Jason and Kylie – although the beginning was not so glamorous because he first took her to bed in a Sydney Travelodge hotel.
8. Jason was dumped in a phone call after Kylie fell for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence instead. Two years later, the rocker did the same to her – revealing over the telephone that he had moved on to supermodel Helena Christensen.
9. Kylie’s clean-cut image is not what it seems. She joined the Mile High Club by having sex with Hutchence on a jumbo jet two seats behind the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
10. Mike Stock certainly proved to be right about Kylie not being “lucky in love”. Her long-term relationships with actor Olivier Martinez, model Andres Velencoso and ex-fiancé Joshua Sasse never reached the aisle.
11. Kylie suffers from hyperglycemia, causing high levels of blood sugar, and has to be careful what she eats.
12. Along the diets she has tried is the Paleo, which involves only food found during the Palaeolithic era, such as fish, nuts and leafy greens.
13. Kylie was born in Melbourne but her mum Carol grew up in Maesteg, South Wales, where her parents ran a post office.
14. Her sixth album, Impossible Princess, was renamed Kylie Minogue after Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
15. Model James Gooding, who Kylie dated between 2000 and 2002, confessed to cheating on her during their time together, having bedded Sophie Dahl in New York.
16. The tiny gold hotpants she barely wore in the video for 2000 hit Spinning Around turned Kylie’s pert backside into a sensation.
17. Perhaps the most surprising rumour about Kylie emerged when an Australian magazine claimed she had secretly been dating Prince Andrew. She has yet to comment on the alleged affair but it is probably too ridiculous to be true.
18. Kylie’s biggest hit Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which has sold more than five million copies and reached number one in 40 countries, was originally intended for S Club 7, whose manager decided to turn it down.
19. Not content with dominating music, Kylie tried to break into literary circles in 2006 with a children’s novel called Showgirl Princess. It told the story of a girl called Kylie who dreamt of becoming, you guessed it, a showgirl princess.
20. As she was preparing to go out on her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, Kylie was misdiagnosed by doctors who wrongly gave her the all-clear. In the end she needed surgery and chemotherapy.
21. Anglia Ruskin University in Essex awarded her an honorary Doctor of Health Science degree for her work in raising awareness about breast cancer.
22. The Sun campaigned to have Kylie’s derriere designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, declaring: “It’s cheeky butt we love it.”
23. Having dated oddball Aussie singer Nick Cave, you could be forgiven for saying Kylie should have gone to Specsavers. And that’s what she did – by releasing her own eyewear collection for the High Street opticians.
24. Despite threatening several times to put her rear behind her, she flaunted the famous asset on the front cover of Italian GQ magazine in 2014.
25. Kylie’s great-grandfather Morgan Riddiford served time for indecent assault in HM Prison Gloucester in 1891, according to the national census.
26. Her younger brother Brendan, 47, works as a news cameraman in Australia and prefers to stay out of the limelight.
27. Kylie’s acting roles include playing a companion for David Tennant’s Doctor Who in the episode Voyage Of The Damned, the Green Fairy in Moulin Rouge! and she provided the voice of Florence in The Magic Roundabout movie.
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28. Is it curtains for Kylie’s career? No way. Just because she is selling home furnishings in House of Fraser, including throws, bed linen, cushions and curtains, it doesn’t mean it’s all over.
29. This year she will be starring alongside Guy Pearce, her old pal from Neighbours, in a movie called Swinging Safari.
30. And she is due to release a new album this year, having worked on songs with Taylor Swift’s hit-machine helper Nathan Chapman in Nashville.