Jess Cartner-Morley talks to Dannii Minogue about motherhood, Kylie and Simon Cowell
Funny how famous Dannii Minogue is now. She arrives at our studio with no fanfare, one hand wheeling behind her a small case of clothes and kit, the other holding a packet of crisps, says her hellos, spots my Dictaphone, sits down. So unassuming is she that a runner who has arrived with a tray of Diet Cokes taps her on the shoulder to ask where he should put them. When she turns around, his face goes white. She just smiles and in her chirpy Aussie twang answers his query straight up, but all the time he is backing away, apologising. When 17 million people watch you on TV every Saturday night, you're not B-list any more.
Also, whatever you may have read, she doesn't look fake or plastic; she's gorgeous. She arrives groomed to within an inch of her life, in a full set of false lashes (these are removed for our shoot), but she is naturally extremely pretty. Her skin is certainly enviably peachy for 39, but her forehead is not Botox-frozen.
Although she is a petite 5ft 2in with size two-and-a-half feet, there is none of the baby-animal vulnerability you might expect from the doll-like proportions. This is partly because she is so flawless, she seems almost enamelled – the dazzle of the mother-of-pearl teeth when she smiles, the click of manicured nails on the table to emphasise a point – and partly because when she widens those vast eyes, they sparkle with Joan Crawford's diamond glint, rather than beseeching with Cheryl Cole's chocolate-button liquidity. She looks tough.
Which is lucky, because it's almost impossible to give an honest account of how Dannii Minogue got to this level of fame without sounding snide. Dannii is a pop singer who was never really famous for being a pop singer. She was famous for being Kylie Minogue's sister; and then she was just sort of famous-for-being-famous, and then she met Simon Cowell and she got really famous for being – of all things – a judge on a reality TV show. It's not exactly A Star Is Born.
When you look closer, however, the Dannii Minogue story is a bit more complicated. For a start it was Dannii, not Kylie, who was a star first. She was born Danielle Jane, the youngest of three children to Ronald and Carol Minogue, who raised the family in Surrey Hills, Melbourne. (As well as Kylie there is a brother, Brendan, a news cameraman.)
Dannii's career began on Australian TV, aged seven, with roles on Skyways and The Sullivans; before she was 10, she joined the prime-time variety show Young Talent Time, which made her a household name in Australia by her early teens.
But in 1987 Kylie, by now starring in Neighbours, leapfrogged her younger sister with the release of her first single, The Locomotion. By 1991, when Dannii released her debut album, she had been singing and dancing on television for more than half her life, yet there was an assumption that she was clutching on to her sister's coat-tails. For the whole of the 1990s and the first half of the noughties, Dannii bumped along as a minor pop star, accruing a respectable string of top 20 hits but always, as her friend Kathy Lette put it, dogged by "this perception that she was the B-side to Kylie's A-side".
That has all changed in the four years since Dannii Minogue joined the X Factor as a judge. Her life now is dominated by the show, and by Ethan, her five-month-old baby with rugby player boyfriend Kris Smith, and today, like every day, she is juggling the two. She is here to promote her new dress range, Project D, but every spare minute of the afternoon is spent emailing song choices back and forth to the "boys" she is mentoring. And because Dannii is still breastfeeding, halfway through the make-up session Kris's mother arrives at the studio carrying Ethan in his car seat.
His grandma, who is down from Manchester to help out the new parents, keeps him happy with peek-a-boo until make-up is finished, at which point Dannii scoops him up and slips out of the room in search of somewhere quiet to feed him before having her hair done.
Until she met Smith, she says, Dannii didn't plan to have children. "I never thought I was very maternal, and I was always so busy with work, and a baby just seemed… like something I was never going to do. For me, the baby idea came from meeting the right man. And now he's here and he's giggling and smiling, I've gone from being not being bothered about being a mum to being quite keen to have a second baby."
I'm slightly taken aback when I discover she's still breastfeeding, just because her newly minted glossiness seems so far from the fuzzy-haired, milky dressing-gowned image I associate with new motherhood, and I think she takes my surprise for disapproval, or something, because she launches into a passionate defence of breastfeeding. "I love it. I absolutely love it. It's the weirdest thing, because before I had the baby, when women talked about breastfeeding, I'd be a bit like, whatever, what's the big deal? Do it or don't, right? But then you have the baby and every cell in your body is crying out to feed this baby. It's an incredible thing. I don't want to stop. It's a bit disruptive for everybody because you have to allow time to feed him in my schedule. And it means he has to be down at the television studio all day Saturday and all day Sunday, because that's where I am."
For the final quarter of each year, the X Factor becomes an unignorable part of British popular culture, a camp national pantomime in weekly instalments. The show has created bona fide pop stars, including Leona Lewis and the boy band JLS, but these stars are not, really, what the X Factor is about. The X Factor is not about us admiring talented people, it is about us – the public at home – standing in judgment over talented people. We, the masses, are no longer satisfied with hearing what "experts" think. Simon Cowell gets this, which is why he has given us both a phone vote and a desk of judges.
The judges are the real stars of the show, because the X Factor is really about the judging, not the judged. Cowell, Dannii, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh – with their back stories and feuds, the fault lines in taste along generation and gender – act out the drama going on on our own sofas, only with snappier soundbites and whiter teeth.
The readers of Heat magazine recently voted Dannii the most popular of the four. If Cowell is the pantomime baddy, Cole the fairytale princess and Walsh the joker, Dannii is the closest to the role of narrator, to everywoman. Is the conflict hammed up? "Everything that happens on screen happens. Mostly, I'm holding back, rather than hamming it up. I've had times when I've been so angry with the comments my contestants were getting that I've just wanted to stand up and walk off, and I have to kind of grip the chair to keep myself from doing it. That's real, very real."
What kind of a judge does she think she is – what's her character, on the show? She is at pains to insist she is being herself. "I don't try to be nice and I don't try to be nasty, I just say what I think. But Simon has drummed it into me that if you're on a panel like this, you have to have an opinion. I try to be constructive."
When Kylie Minogue performed a new song on the X Factor earlier this series, with Dannii watching, it seemed a defining moment for the Minogues: for the first time in two decades, the two were showbiz equals. "I know what you're saying... but all those years of articles, of reading, 'She's in her sister's shadow' or whatever – of course, I see that stuff, but it was never how things really were. My sister and I are really close, and we always have been. What I find a bit sad is that the sibling rivalry story went away only when Kylie was diagnosed with cancer. Then people stood back and thought, this isn't funny any more, these are real people, there is real love there. It took something like that to stop a joke that wasn't funny in the first place. But, for us, the relationship has never changed."
Then she neatly sidesteps into sparkle mode. "When Kylie came on stage, all I was thinking was, those are some high heels, please don't fall!"
It was Kylie who first suggested that Dannii would be good as a judge on a talent show. "It had never crossed my mind. She said it because I used to go down to her concert tours when they were in pre-production and afterwards I'd have a list of comments – you should change this, you need to watch that. I'd be her eyes out front while she was on stage, and I wanted it to be great. She's had the same crew for ever, and as soon as I turned up they'd be like, 'Oh no, Dannii's here... we're gonna get the list!'"
Then Dannii sat next to Cowell at a dinner and he turned to her and said, "I'm going to make you an international TV star."
This is a true story. "We were on the same table at the GQ awards. I didn't really know what he meant at the time." Shortly afterwards came the call-up for the judging panel of Australia's Got Talent, from which she graduated to the X Factor.
Dannii was married briefly in her youth, to Australian actor Julian McMahon, and dated high-profile men including racing driver Jacques Villeneuve, before meeting Kris Smith while on holiday in Ibiza two years ago. It was August, and by the time they got back to the UK, "the live shows were starting, so if he wanted to see me at weekends, he had to come to the show, because that's where I was." She loved how unimpressed he was by it all.
"He's from up north, he's into sport, the whole entertainment world is, well, let's say, new to him. He's just not that fussed. The look on his face when he's backstage and there's some drama kicking off is just priceless. That appealed to me right from the start."
A hangover from the Kylie's-little-sister decades is that even now that she is settled with Smith, it is Dannii's relationships with other women the public home in on. First there was a high-profile spat with Sharon Osbourne, who named Dannii as the reason she left the X Factor, and now there is The Cheryl Question. So I ask it. How do the two of them get on? She throws her head back and laughs. "Good! Fine! We get on like any of the judges, but that's the relationship everyone wants to know about. She's very sweet, just like she is on camera. If I have a bad day, she's the one who's most likely to knock on my door and see if I'm OK."
There is a healthy style rivalry between the two, and the consensus this season is that Dannii is winning. She has found a look that suits her, zeroing in on sophisticated, glamorous, timeless dresses: Antonio Berardi, Marchesa, Dolce & Gabbana, Victoria Beckham. Acknowledging what a key part of the show her frocks now are, Dannii has joined Cheryl in hiring a stylist this season. "I'm busy with Ethan, so I have less time, and I was in Australia all summer, and then, when I got back, I was still coming down from my baby weight."
Last year, Dannii launched the fashion range Project D, in collaboration with designer Tabitha Somerset Webb. Today she is wearing a simple black coat from the range, over a black sweater, tight jeans and boots: it's a chic, professional, camera-friendly aesthetic, rather than a fashion-forward one. The women met as friends, and "we both design. She designs stuff she loves, I design what works for me – we are very different body shapes, so that helps. She runs the day-to-day business, and inevitably, because of my work, I do more of the promotion."
Project D has expanded this year, with a perfume and a bigger collection planned for 2011. "It's going to be a big part of my future," Dannii says. What about the X Factor? "X Factor is incredible, because I'm part of something massive, and I love that. It doesn't feel like television, even – it feels like it's real. But it's not, and I could be gone tomorrow." Really? "Really. I mean, don't ask me. Ask Simon Cowell. I'm just like everyone else – I have to wait and see if I get his thumbs up."
Dannii's Project D dress collection is on sale now.
