CityLife

Danni in the spotlight

SHE is the strong-willed pop diva whose greatest rival is her big sister and who keeps being unlucky in love. That at least is what her cuttings tell me, but then Dannii Minogue herself is telling me I can believe only 10 per cent of what is written about her in the red-top newspapers. So which bits are true? Are you really the kind of woman who, one internet men's magazine wishfully conjectures, "punishes her man with whips and chains" Minogue laughs off the notion as ridiculous, and takes down the website's address for future reference.

"I don't know that I am stern," she says. "I definitely know what I want to do and that obviously comes across a lot harder when a woman is saying it. If I was a man in my thirties and in a job where I was wearing a business suit, people would not say that about me. But because I am a woman who goes to work in a pair of heels and sings songs, people find it very difficult that I have no qualms about saying that I know what I want. I go for it and enjoy what I do. I think that is a good thing - a positive image."

And Minogue, now 31, has been doing what she does for a very long time. The popular misconception is that Dannii rode to fame on the coat-tails of her sister Kylie, three years the elder. The truth is that, until Kylie joined Neighbours in 1986, Dannii was much the more famous of the pair in their homeland of Australia.

She did her first acting roles at the age of six, became a regular on the Young Talent Time TV show at 10 and, by 16, had her own Dannii fashion range. The two sisters followed similar career paths combining soap opera and pop, both making new lives in London, neither settling into long-lasting relationships. But it was Kylie who began chalking up the hits first, and Dannii has never caught up.

What Dannii can boast is an intriguing CV - including Macbeth at the Edinburgh Festival, the Vagina Monologues, the West End musical Notre Dame de Paris and a spell as presenter of the Big Breakfast. She has kept the gossip columns busy with a brief marriage to fellow Home And Away actor Julian McMahon, and, after divorcing, a relationship with racing driver Jacques Villeneuve. Her boyfriend for the past year has been Craig Logan, once the third member of eighties band Bros and now a successful record company executive.

As the younger Minogue prepares to release a dance single Put The Needle On It on Monday, Kylie has dipped out of the spotlight, returning to Australia for a six-month rest.

"We don't plan our careers around each other," says Dannii. "But we were making jokes about passing the Minogue baton on. She was saying `Now it's your go'."

Dannii knows all about the need for rest and relaxation, as she, like Kylie, took a long spell out before recording her fourth album, due out next year. "I literally was not working for a year and half," she recalls. "I had worked professionally full-time from the age of 10. It was a mid-life crisis at a very early age. I had packed so much in."

Dannii Minogue appears in the Smash Hits Poll Winners Tour at the Manchester Evening News Arena on Sunday.