Netflix: Kylie Minogue finally tells what she’s been hiding since 2021

Kylie Minogue reveals she secretly battled a second cancer.Image: netflix

Long mocked, sexualized then scrutinized even during her illness, Kylie Minogue recounts in a Netflix documentary her meteoric rise, her intimate wounds and a second cancer kept secret for years. A rare confession for a star who has always carefully kept his distance.

“Where to start?â€asks Kylie Minogue. His Netflix documentary provides an immediate answer: in the 1980s. It condenses into three hours his rise as a television and pop star, his career setbacks, his love life and his fight against cancer. However, the 57-year-old singer is rarely accessible. “I’m not hiding anything from you. I hide things from myself,” she adds.

Almost overnight, at the age of 19, Kylie Minogue became world famous thanks to the title “Lucky” and her image as a joyful “girl nextdoor”. At the same time, the press demolished it. She is compared to a “singing parrot” who doesn’t know how to sing anyway and pilloried for her superficial and hollow songs.

When she reinvented herself with a more adult and sexier image, a new wave of criticism fell (“She went from the girl next door to the girl on the mattress!”, wrote one tabloid).

The celebrity press goes so far as to credit her with breast augmentation, with before/after photos to back it up. Years later, it all seems strangely familiar. Britney Spears, then Miley Cyrus, will undergo exactly the same treatment.

Kylie Minogue also leads the way in another area: her posterior causes real hysteria when she appears with confidence and independence in very short hot pants, conquering the music charts long before Jennifer Lopez or Kim Kardashian. In German-speaking countries, she is nicknamed “Geili Kylie” (an untranslatable term meaning hot or sexy).

Kylie Minogue has reinvented herself many times over the years – until she found herself.image: netflix

The shell is cracking

Concerning the sentimental life of Kylie Minogue, the viewer will however be left wanting more. Archival clips, cruel interview questions and critical press headlines tell more. The artist remains modest.

Even when his ex-companion Michael Hutchence is mentioned. She shared the life of the INXS singer for two years before their separation in 1991. In 1997, he died of an overdose. Did she herself use drugs around this time?

And at one point in her own documentary, she cuts short: “Anyway, let’s put this behind us.” It is only when the singer’s funeral is discussed that her voice begins to tremble for the first time.

Thanks to his unwavering belief in his talent, Michael Hutchence will continue to have a great influence on Kylie Minogue, even after his death.image: netflix

Then came the diagnosis of breast cancer. In 2004, at the age of 36, she received this terrible news. “Logically, the tour was canceled,” she said with a laugh, once again trying to keep her distance. Perhaps because the press was merciless with her: “I was a prisoner of my house.”

But then the dam bursts. She then speaks clearly of fear and dark thoughts, of the “great moments” when she regained eyelashes, and of the fact that she had postponed her chemotherapy to try to become a mother through artificial fertilization. “But it didn’t work.”

Then comes this sentence:

She ends up returning to the forefront, and her return is triumphant. But in the final minutes of the documentary, Kylie reveals what no one knew until now: “I was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021.”

This time, she didn’t want to share it with the world: “And I couldn’t either. I was nothing more than a shadow of myself.” In all discretion, she once again managed to overcome the illness.

The documentary dedicated to Kylie Minogue is therefore truly astonishing. Not just for the revelation of this second cancer diagnosis. But above all for the awareness it provokes in the spectator.

The singer was a pioneer in many ways. Long mocked and insulted as a simple popstarlet, she imposed an independent and assertive image, carried by her physique and her famous posterior, while helping to put the issue of breast cancer at the heart of the public debate thanks to her illness.

And she’s not done: “There are still songs I haven’t written and people I haven’t reached yet. My story continues.”

(Kylie, a three-episode documentary, has been available on Netflix since May 20.)

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