Kylie Ann Minogue (; born 28 May 1968) is an Australian singer, songwriter, and actress. Frequently referred to as the "Princess of Pop", she has achieved recognition in both the music industry and the fashion world as a major style icon. Her accolades include two Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards and eighteen ARIA Music Awards. Minogue is the highest-selling Australian-born female artist of all time, with sales surpassing 80 million records worldwide. Minogue received two Guinness World Records. In 2024, Time included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring as Charlene Mitchell in the Australian soap opera Neighbours (1986–1988). She began her music career in the late 1980s, releasing four dance-pop studio albums under PWL. By the early 1990s, Minogue had amassed several hit singles in Australia and the UK, including "The Loco-Motion", "I Should Be So Lucky", "Especially for You", "Hand on Your Heart", and "Better the Devil You Know". Taking more creative control over her music, she signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released the albums Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997).
By joining Parlophone in 1999, Minogue returned to mainstream dance-oriented music with Light Years (2000), 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. The lead single, "Can't Get You Out of My Head", was a worldwide chart-topper and became one of the most successful singles of the 2000s, selling over twelve million units. Follow-up singles "In Your Eyes" and "Love at First Sight" became hits as well. She 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" and "All the Lovers". In 2017, she signed with BMG, leading to several number-one albums in Australia and the UK – Golden (2018), Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection (2019), Disco (2020), Tension (2023) and Tension II (2024). She is the only female artist in the UK charts, with a number-one single in four decades and the first female to achieve chart-topping albums in five consecutive decades.
In film, Minogue made her debut in The Delinquents (1989), and appeared in Street Fighter (1994), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012) and San Andreas (2015). In reality television, she appeared as a judge on The Voice UK and The Voice Australia, both in 2014. Her other ventures include product endorsements, books, perfumes, charitable work and a wine brand. Minogue's achievements include being an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Chevalier (knight) of the and an honorary Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.).
Life and career 1968–1986: Early life and career beginnings Kylie Ann Minogue was born at Bethlehem Hospital in Caulfield South, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, on 28 May 1968, to Carol Ann (née Jones), a former ballet dancer, and Ronald Charles Minogue, car company accountant. Her mother moved to Australia from Wales 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 Irish, English and Welsh descent. She was named Kylie 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 an actress, 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 often stayed at home reading, sewing, and learning to play violin and piano. When they moved to Surrey Hills, 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, Australian television producer Alan Hardy gave Minogue a minor role in soap opera The Sullivans (1979). She also appeared in another small role in soap opera Skyways (1980). In 1985, she was cast in one of the lead roles in the television series The Henderson Kids. Minogue took time off school to film The Henderson Kids and while Carol was not impressed, Minogue felt 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 Hardy felt the need for her character to be "written off". In retrospect, Hardy stated 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, and was not invited to join the cast.
She was cast in the soap opera Neighbours in 1986, as Charlene Mitchell, a schoolgirl turned garage mechanic. The show 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. She 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.
1987–1989: Kylie and Enjoy Yourself
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, and was later given a completely new backing track by producer Mike Duffy, inspired by the hi-NRG sound of English band Dead or Alive. "Locomotion" was released as her debut single in Australia on 13 July 1987, the week after the wedding episode of Neighbours premiered. The single became the best-selling single of the decade in Australia, according to the Kent Music Report.
The success of the single 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 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. The song reached number one in Australia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Switzerland and the UK. 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 on 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 in Australia. Later in the year, she left Neighbours to focus on her music career. She 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 single peaked at number one in the UK. By December 2014, it sold its one-millionth copy in the country. She 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. She won her second consecutive ARIA Award for the year's highest-selling single and received a "Special Achievement Award".
Minogue's second studio album, Enjoy Yourself, was released in October 1989. The album was number-one in the UK, and spawned the number-one singles in the country such as "Hand on Your Heart" and "Tears on My Pillow". In North America, it failed to sell well and she was dropped by American record label Geffen Records. Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine, stated "there isn't a lot to differentiate her second effort from its predecessor by repeating the sonic template of her debut album." In support of the album, she embarked on her concert tour, the Enjoy Yourself Tour in Europe, Asia and Australia in February 1990. Minogue's debut film, The Delinquents, was released in December 1989. The film received mixed reviews from critics and was 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 Australian INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
1990–1992: Rhythm of Love, Let's Get to It and Greatest Hits
Unhappy with her level of creative input on her first two albums, Minogue worked with her manager Terry Blamey and her Australian label Mushroom Records to force a change in her relationship with SAW, and to push for a more mature sound. Minogue's third album, Rhythm of Love, was released in November 1990 and was described as "leaps and bounds more mature" than her previous albums by AllMusic's Chris True. The project contained more "sophisticated" themes and influences, with composer Mike Stock stating that "Shocked" was influenced by the writings of Virginia Woolf, and was meant to be evocative of "a trip". Despite exhibiting creative growth, the album did not match the commercial success of its predecessors, peaking at number nine in the UK. However, Blamey described the album as a "big success" that "made lots of money for PWL". Three of its singles – "Better the Devil You Know", "Step Back in Time" and "Shocked" – reached the top ten in Australia. In the UK, all four singles entered the top ten.