When I was seven years old, I vividly remember watching Kylie Minogue perform during the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. I can still picture her showgirl costume, with fuchsia feathers and shimmering silver tassels, as she belted out a cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in front of the world.
I didn’t quite realize it yet, but I was about to become one of Minogue’s devoted gay fans, a group she says she would go to “war” for. “There’s something we understand about each other,” she tells me, almost conspiratorially, at the very start of our conversation. “There’s a spirit we both have, which is resilience.”
Resilience is the recurring theme of Kylie, the new Netflix docuseries that follows Minogue over almost 40 years in the spotlight. We see her bubblegum pop breakthrough in the 1980s, before her struggle against cynical record bosses and the misogynistic tabloid press. She experiences loss, heartbreak, and life-threatening cancer diagnoses, all while continuing to reinvent her image and sound.
The docuseries marks a departure from the elusiveness that has always surrounded Minogue’s personal life. As a star, she’s always been known for being private, to the point where we’re only now learning that she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time in 2021. Throughout making the docuseries, she felt a “low hum of anxiety,” she says. At times, she even wondered, “Is this the worst mistake I’ve ever made?”
My biggest reflection from speaking with her is that she owes her success to a deep desire to break free from constraints, which is just as much a survival mechanism as it is a form of artistic expression. And now that she’s finally reached a point where she’s got nothing left to prove, she’s sharing more than ever before.
Way back in the decade of big hair and (even bigger) shoulder pads, Minogue’s showbiz story didn’t actually start with music. In 1986, when she was 18, she was cast on the Australian soap Neighbors as Charlene—a tomboy mechanic who embarked on a romance with the soap’s boy-next-door, Scott Robinson. The storyline foreshadowed her real-life romance with costar Jason Donovan, which coincided with Neighbors becoming an unexpected phenomenon in the UK when it started airing on the BBC. At its peak, the soap was watched by more Brits than the entire Australian population, turning Minogue into an A-list star on the other side of the world.
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