Dannii, we hardly knew you

By JOHN WALSH

As Dannii Minogue will tell you, care must be used in accessing her website. It's www.dannii.com you want, "the website for all your Dannii needs, which Dannii herself helps to write."

Whether your "Dannii needs" should be an update on the tiny Australian's career on stage — she's just taken over as Esmerelda in the rock-opera blockbuster Notre Dame de Paris at London's Dominion Theatre — a reminder of her days in soap operas or just a leisurely ogle at her perma-tanned flesh in the "Dannii Pictures" slot, everything will be catered for. Just don't miss out that final "i."

"Because there's a famous porn site called danni.com, and you don't want to go spelling it wrong," she counsels you severely. "Apparently she gets more hits than any other porn site, and it may just be people looking for me."

At 29, Dannii would like to be known for something more than a slender body and a pretty face, thank you very much. She wants to make sure her many talents are properly appreciated.

Ever since she was 7, she's been performing like billyo, unceasingly, unstoppably — acting, singing, dancing, writing, going blond, going brunette, slimming down, fronting up, being measured against her big sister Kylie, transforming herself into a lad-mags, cover-girl sexpot along the lines of the World's Most Downloaded Woman, even getting her kit off for Australian Playboy — until, ironically, she is now known more for being a celeb than for anything more specific.

The day we met, the tabloids were exploring another aspect of the Minogue phenomenon — Dannii the Well-Known Girlfriend. She has just split up with Jacques Villeneuve, the French-Canadian racing driver, her boyfriend of 18 months and on-off fiance, and the showbiz vultures have been speculating impertinently about "the Minogue girls" and how they can't seem to hang to boyfriends.

Dannii is 157cm of determination in tight black slacks and a purple zip-up fleece. She has tiny hips, tiny feet and her cheekbones are so fine you fear they'll poke through the delicate membrane of her skin; but she radiates wiry toughness.

Her big turquoise eyes are as cold as ice. Her hair is as raven-black as Morticia Addams' and she twirls a skein of it in her fingers, like an apprentice strangler, as she talks about Notre Dame de Paris, a supercharged retelling of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Apart from her role as Emma the punk in the Home And Away soap, and a bizarre excursion as Lady Macbeth in the Edinburgh Festival, it's the only acting she's done.

"It was something I wanted to do," she says. "Some of my fans had been writing to my website saying, 'When can we see you perform again? It's been two years since you had a live performance'."

She's not bad in Notre Dame de Paris — although she plays Esmerelda as, frankly, Dannii Minogue in green designer rags. Her singing is fine, she emotes with the conviction of a silent-movie vamp, and she puts on a convincing act of little-girl vulnerability when her boyfriend Phoebus is being stabbed by the horrible priest.

But she moves around the vast granite stones of the cathedral and the stews of the Val d'Amour like a tiny, barefoot visiting duchess, gracing the company with her presence. You could more readily imagine her as a cosmetics buyer for a mid-range department store than a passionate gypsy.

"I think the core of Esmerelda is that she's a free spirit," says Dannii. "She's actually quite innocent, very religious and ever hopeful. She's unaware of other people's reactions to her."

Ms Minogue is bracingly supportive of the show, despite its awful reviews, the awfulness of the English lyrics ("Notre Dame de Paris/ my home in the sky,/ Where you always ponder why/ We must live and we must die"), and the fact that the playback in her earpiece packed up disastrously during the climactic song on the first night.

"This is what I like about this show," she confides. "We're getting a young audience, people from kids to teenagers to my age group who'd never think of going to the theatre, who'd rather go to the movies or the the pub or go clubbing. I'd like to get some of those people to come along."

Ah, youth. What we're looking at here, I suspect, is a slight case of arrested development. Young Danielle Minogue was involved in an Australian TV show called Young Talent Time when she was barely in double figures.

"There was a talent school attached to it. Lots of kids went with their pushy mothers, hoping to get them on stage. I just went because I loved the classes, the singing and dancing, and that's what got me the job in the end."

Dannii worked at it six days a week, weaving it around her school life. She and Kylie, her elder by four years, were used to singing and dancing around the house, "annoying everyone," before they hit their teens. When she left school at 16, it was to take a chance in showbiz, on the understanding that she could go back and pick up her studies.

Instead she's spent a dozen years trying out being a soap star, pop star, entertainer and all-round dreamboat without ever settling into any one role.

Look on the Dannii (whoops!) website at the 150-odd pictures of this talented beauty, and marvel at how many people she's turned herself into over the years, as she's looked for a home in the limelight.

"Some people," she says witheringly, "usually female journalists, interpret it as though you must be mentally unstable or terribly dissatisfied with your life and your looks if you're always trying to change them. They can't believe you can be happy with the way you are. But it's fun, it's just part of being a girl; it's like being allowed to use makeup. It's just getting in touch with my feminine side."

- INDEPENDENT


www.dannii.com