Kylie Minogue
Kylie Minogue
Kylie Ann Minogue (born May 28, 1968) is an Australian singer and actress who has been based in the United Kingdom for nearly a decade. Her career has risen, fallen, risen, fallen and risen again, but she has persisted, to the extent that she is now simply Kylie.
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2 Neighbours 3 Recording career 4 Film career 5 Celebrity status 6 Album Discography 7 Single Discography 8 External links |
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Kylie Minogue is the eldest of three children (sister Dannii and brother Brendan). Influenced by her mother's career, she decided to go into show business, and made her TV debut at the age of 11. She appeared in several Australian television series as a child and teenager, including Young Talent Time, The Sullivans and The Henderson Kids, before rising to prominence in 1986 with her role in the Australian soap opera Neighbours.
Kylie played the character of Charlene Mitchell, a tomboy who rebelled at every opportunity. Charlene soon fell in love with boy next door Scott Robinson, played by Jason Donovan. The storylines between the young lovers proved popular with viewers and they soon became famous. A record audience watched the episode featuring Scott and Charlene's wedding in 1987.
As part of an Australian Rules Football charity event in 1987, Kylie sang a boppy cover of Little Eva's The Loco-Motion. The song was so successful the Australian record company Mushroom Records released it as a single. It shot to number one in the Australian charts for 7 weeks and also topped the New Zealand charts. It became the best selling Australian single of the 1980s.
Her success caught the attention of British production team Stock Aitken Waterman (or 'SAW', a team working for the PWL record label responsible for many bubblegum late-'80s pop hits), and she soon left Australia for London, signing a 5 year record contract. Her first album Kylie was the best selling album of 1988 in Europe and Australia, and spawned several international number one singles including the classic I Should Be So Lucky, The Loco-Motion and Got To Be Certain. The Loco-Motion reached #3 on the American Billboard Charts and she also had minor American hits with "I Should Be So Lucky" and "It's No Secret", though she failed to make a firm impression on the American record-buying public.
After the singles from Kylie, Kylie released a duet with her Neighbours cast-mate Jason Donovan, who by this time was also a SAW star. Especially For You went to number one and narrowly missed out on becoming the UK's 1988 Christmas number one.
Three more PWL albums followed, Enjoy Yourself (1989), Rhythm of Love (1990) and Let's Get To It (1991). The albums contained several memorable pop tunes including Better the Devil You Know and Shocked, although Kylie was, at this point, more of a singles act. Disagreements soon followed with producer Pete Waterman over her level of artistic freedom. In a bold move, Kylie left PWL to join indie/dance label Deconstruction. A concurrent romance with Michael Hutchence of INXS caused her to adopt a less innocent, more vampish image.
Her first album for her new label, the self-titled Kylie Minogue was a much more industrial, noisier affair than the lightweight pop which had been her staple up to that point. It spawned only one successful hit, Confide In Me, and the album sold disappointingly, alienating her pop fans and never connecting with a more critical audience. Minogue seemed likely to vanish into the post-PWL void which had swallowed up Mel and Kim, Sinitta, and indeed Jason Donovan himself. Certainly, the pattern of pop hits - exploitation, dissatisfaction, maturity, obscurity - was well-established by that time. Very few acts had managed to buck the trend.
Her career was revived, particularly in Australia, with a dark, surreal single with Nick Cave called Where The Wild Roses Grow in 1995. The song was a duet between a murderer (Cave) and his victim (Minogue). Cave also persuaded Minogue to recite the lyrics to I Should Be So Lucky as poetry in a 1996 poetry jam held at the Royal Albert Hall.
Her second (and final) Deconstruction album Impossible Princess (renamed Kylie Minogue in the UK in light of the contemporary death of Princess Diana) contained collaborations with artists such as Manic Street Preachers. The album received some favourable reviews - many of the critics who had hitherto dismissed her began to appreciate her pluck - but it sold even less, and soon she was dropped. For a brief while she took to modelling lingerie for H&M, a move which was seen at the time as an inglorious failure.
Flushed with renewed success, Kylie played to the biggest audience of her career at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where she performed a cover version of the ABBA hit Dancing Queen and her then current single On A Night Like This.
On the back of the success of Light Years, she went on to release a further album, Fever, which surprisingly debuted in the American Billboard Charts at number 3. Ever since The Beatles' success it had been a goal of British producers to 'crack America', something they appeared to have done with Kylie. The album was heavily influenced by '80s electropop, such as the Human League and early Depeche Mode. The single Can't Get You Out Of My Head topped the charts in many countries including the UK and Australia, and for the first time penetrated the US charts. In the UK, in particular, it was an enormous success, remaining on radio playlists for most of 2001. The song was catchy, sophisticated, and blessed with a striking video. An unauthorised remix which combined Kylie's vocals with the tune of New Order's classic "Blue Monday" became an underground hit, and Kylie boosted the burgeoning Bastard Pop scene by performing this version at the 2002 Brit Awards, a masterstroke which brought her to the attention of a trendy late-twentysomething demographic which had bopped 'til dawn to the original.
Kylie's credibility as a recording artist in the USA has been enhanced by winning a Grammy in 2004 for Best Dance Recording for Come Into My World against fellow nominees Madonna, Cher, Groove Armada and TÃÂélÃÂépopmusik. She had previously been nominated for the same award in 2003 for Love At First Sight.
In 2002, Madame Tussaud's revealed a new-look Kylie Minogue waxwork. Posed in the manner of a leopard about to leap, the waxwork was both criticised and praised for the visible extent of Minogue's bottom, clad only in Agent Provocateur underwear.
In 2003 she released Body Language. The first single from it, the slinky and understated Slow, topped the charts in the UK and Australia and was a major hit throughout Europe and much of the world. Simultaneously, Kylie launched a range of lingerie, 'LoveKylie', which sold strongly. Indeed, her lingerie calendar was the UK's best-selling calendar in 2003, the second-best selling being Kylie's non-lingerie calendar.
In 2004, Kylie's publicists stated that this would be the year she would "conquer America". Slow, the first single from the Body Language album, had failed to chart strongly on the singles chart despite reaching number one on the Billboard Club Chart, but they remained optimistic. In February she visited the USA to promote the upcoming release of "Body Language" and performed her second single Red Blooded Woman on The Late Show with David Letterman. She also filmed a guest segment for the TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and promoted the show's CD soundtrack - her song Slow being one of its featured tracks.
Throughout her music career, Kylie has taken breaks to return to acting.
In 1989, she starred in The Delinquents, a tale of Australian teenage life in the late 1950s. The film was critically panned and was not a commercial success, although the soundtrack single Tears On My Pillow went to number one.
In 1994 she played Cammy in the action film Street Fighter, based on the computer game of the same name. The film received monumentally poor reviews, although Kylie emerged unscathed.
Her greatest film success was in her smallest role. In Moulin Rouge (2001) she played the part of Absinthe, the Green Fairy, singing a line from The Sound of Music.
Throughout her career, Kylie has been the subject of intense media interest in both the United Kingdom and Australia, and even during the lulls in her career, this level of interest has not diminished. She has regularly appeared on the covers of such magazines as Vogue and Vanity Fair as well as providing fodder for less esteemed publications, and her consistently changing image has maintained her status as a pop icon. Her current relationship with French actor Olivier Martinez has led to speculation that she is either poised for marriage or is pregnant. In Australia she is regarded as a national treasure and is admired for her professionalism and tenacity. Her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and she has been the subject of a postage stamp commemorating significant achievements in Australian popular music.
Early life
Neighbours
Recording career
''Kylie Minogue
in the video for
'Spinning Around' ''Film career
Celebrity status
Album Discography
Single Discography
External links
