Kylie Ann Minogue AO OBE (born 28 May 1968) is an Australian singer, songwriter and actress. Minogue is the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time, having sold over 80 million records worldwide. She has been recognised for reinventing herself in music as well as fashion, and is referred to by the European press as the “Princess of Pop” and a style icon. Her accolades include a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards and seventeen ARIA Music Awards.

Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, playing tomboy mechanic Charlene Robinson. She gained prominence as a recording artist in the late 1980s and released four bubblegum and dance-pop-influenced studio albums produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. By the early 1990s, she had amassed several top ten singles in the UK and Australia, including “I Should Be So Lucky”, “The Loco-Motion”, “Especially for You”, “Hand on Your Heart”, and “Better the Devil You Know”. Taking more creative control over her music, Minogue signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997), both of which received positive reviews. She returned to mainstream dance-oriented music with 2000’s Light Years, including the number-one hits “Spinning Around” and “On a Night Like This”. The follow-up, Fever (2001), was an international breakthrough for Minogue, becoming her best-selling album to date. Two of its singles, “Love at First Sight” and “In Your Eyes”, became hits, with its lead single, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” becoming one of the most successful singles of the 2000s, selling over five million units.

Minogue continued reinventing her image and experimenting with a range of genres on her subsequent albums, which spawned successful singles such as “Slow”, “I Believe in You”, “2 Hearts”, “All the Lovers”, “Dancing” and “Padam Padam”. In the UK charts, she is the only female artist to have a chart-topping album and top ten single, from the 1980s to the 2020s.

In film, Minogue made her debut in The Delinquents (1989). She has also appeared in the films Street Fighter (1994) as Cammy, Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012) and San Andreas (2015). In reality television, she appeared as a judge on the third series of The Voice UK and The Voice Australia both in 2014. Her other ventures include product endorsements, books, fashion, charitable work and wine brand.

Minogue was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to music. She was appointed by the French government as a Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to the enrichment of French culture. While touring in 2005, Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.) degree by Anglia Ruskin University in 2011 for her work in raising awareness for breast cancer. At the 2011 ARIA Music Awards, Minogue was inducted by the Australian Recording Industry Association into the ARIA Hall of Fame. She was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2019 Australia Day Honours.

Kylie Ann Minogue was born at Bethlehem Hospital in Caulfield South, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, on 28 May 1968, to car company accountant Ronald Charles Minogue and his wife Carol Ann (née Jones), a former ballet dancer. Both parents had moved to Australia in 1958 as part of an assisted migration scheme on the ship Fairsea. Also aboard were the Gibb family of later Bee Gees fame. Minogue is of English and Welsh descent (though her surname is of Irish origin) and was named after the Nyungar word for “boomerang”. She is the eldest of three children: her brother, Brendan Minogue, is a news cameraman in Australia, and her sister, Dannii Minogue, is a singer and television host. The family frequently moved around various suburbs in Melbourne to sustain their living expenses, which Minogue found unsettling as a child. She would often stay at home reading, sewing, and learning to play violin and piano. When they moved to Surrey Hills, Victoria, she went on to Camberwell High School. During her schooling years, she found it difficult to make friends. She got her HSC with subjects including Arts and Graphics and English. Minogue described herself as being of “average intelligence” and “quite modest” during her high school years. Growing up, she and her sister Dannii took singing and dancing lessons.

A 10-year-old Minogue accompanied Dannii to a hearing arranged by the sisters’ aunt, Suzette, and, while producers found Dannii too young, Alan Hardy gave Minogue a minor role in soap opera The Sullivans (1979). She also appeared in another small role in Skyways (1980). In 1985, she was cast in one of the lead roles in The Henderson Kids. Minogue took time off school to film The Henderson Kids and while Carol was not impressed, Minogue felt that she needed the independence to make it into the entertainment industry. During filming, co-star Nadine Garner labelled Minogue “fragile” after producers yelled at her for forgetting her lines; she would often cry on set. Minogue was dropped from the second season of the show after producer Alan Hardy felt the need for her character to be “written off”. In retrospect, Hardy stated that removing her from the show “turned out to be the best thing for her”. Interested in following a career in music, Minogue made a demo tape for the producers of weekly music program Young Talent Time, which featured Dannii as a regular performer. Minogue gave her first television singing performance on the show in 1985 but was not invited to join the cast. Minogue was cast in the soap opera Neighbours in 1986, as Charlene Mitchell, a schoolgirl turned garage mechanic. Neighbours achieved popularity in the UK, and a story arc that created a romance between her character and the character played by Jason Donovan culminated in a wedding episode in 1987 that attracted an audience of 20 million viewers. Minogue became the first person to win four Logie Awards in one year and was the youngest recipient of the “Gold Logie Award for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television”, with the result determined by public vote.

During a Fitzroy Football Club benefit concert, Minogue performed “I Got You Babe” as a duet with fellow actor John Waters, and “The Loco-Motion” as an encore. Producer Greg Petherick arranged for Minogue to record a demo of the latter song, re-titled as “Locomotion”. The demo was sent to the head of Mushroom Records Michael Gudinski, who decided to sign Minogue in early 1987 based on her popularity from Neighbours. The track was first recorded in big band style, but was later given a completely new backing track by producer Mike Duffy, inspired by the hi-NRG sound of UK band Dead or Alive. “Locomotion” was released as her debut single in Australia on 13 July 1987, the week after the Neighbours wedding episode premiered. The single became the best-selling single of the decade in Australia according to the Kent Music Report. The success of “Locomotion” resulted in Minogue travelling to London to work with record producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman in September 1987. They knew little of Minogue and had forgotten that she was arriving; as a result, they wrote “I Should Be So Lucky” while she waited outside the studio. The track was written and recorded in under 40 minutes. Although Minogue needed to be convinced to work with Stock Aitken Waterman again after feeling she’d been disrespected during her first recording session, more sessions with the producers occurred from February to April 1988 in London and Melbourne, where the singer was filming her last episodes for Neighbours. The trio ended up composing and producing all the tracks on the forthcoming album and produced a new version of “The Loco-Motion”. Producer Pete Waterman justified the highly controversial decision to re-record the latter track by claiming Minogue’s platinum-selling Australian version was poorly produced, but Mike Duffy instead blamed the decision on Waterman’s alleged wish to claim the prestige and royalties from the track’s placement of the soundtrack of the 1988 film Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

Minogue’s self-titled debut album, Kylie, was released in July 1988. The album is a collection of dance-oriented pop tunes and spent more than a year on the UK Albums Chart, including several weeks at number one, eventually becoming the best-selling album of the 1980s by a female artist. It went gold in the United States, while the single “The Locomotion” reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, and number one on the Canadian dance chart. The single “Got to Be Certain” became her third consecutive number one single on the Australian music charts. Later in the year, she left Neighbours to focus on her music career. Minogue also collaborated with Jason Donovan on the song “Especially for You”, after intense demand for the duet from the public, media and retailers overcame her initial reservations. The track peaked at number-one in the United Kingdom and, in December 2014, sold its one millionth copy in the UK. Minogue was sometimes referred to as “the Singing Budgie” by her detractors over the coming years. In a review of the album Kylie for AllMusic, Chris True described the tunes as “standard, late-80s … bubblegum”, but added, “her cuteness makes these rather vapid tracks bearable”. She received the ARIA Award for the year’s highest-selling single. The song reached number one in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Israel and Hong Kong. Minogue won her second consecutive ARIA Award for the year’s highest-selling single, and received a “Special Achievement Award”.

Minogue’s second album, Enjoy Yourself, was released in October 1989. It was a success in the United Kingdom, Europe, New Zealand, Asia and Australia and spawned the UK number-one singles “Hand on Your Heart” and “Tears on My Pillow”. However, it failed to sell well throughout North America, and Minogue was dropped by her American record label Geffen Records. She then embarked on her first concert tour, the Enjoy Yourself Tour, in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and Australia in February 1990. She was also one of the featured vocalists on the remake of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. Minogue’s debut film, The Delinquents, was released in December 1989. The movie received mixed reviews by critics but proved popular with audiences. In the UK it grossed more than £200,000, and in Australia, it was the fourth-highest-grossing local film of 1989 and the highest-grossing local film of 1990. From 1989 to 1991, Minogue dated INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.