Dannii Minogue: My side of the story

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The day after her Sept. 26 return to the UK’s The X Factor as a judge, Dannii Minogue was back at work on the London set of a Marks & Spencer Christmas TV ad with 1960s model Twiggy. Wearing a fluffy mauve robe and ugg boots, her hair in curlers and under a net, Minogue, 38, beamed between takes when her 3-month-old son, Ethan—in the arms of his proud father, Kris Smith, 32—dropped by the makeup room.

The mixing of domestic bliss and professional duties may have been a distraction from the buzz generated by the Sept. 30 release of Minogue’s autobiography, My Story. In it, the star spills about being called “the less successful Minogue sister” and her rocky relationships with her former mother-in-law, Lady (Sonia) McMahon, and her X Factor nemesis, Sharon Osbourne. Her darkest days, she writes, came in 1995 when she was dropped by her UK record label and left with “nothing” after splitting with Julian McMahon: “I was struggling with the stark realisation that nobody wanted me—not my record company, not my husband and definitely not the public.”

Spruiking My Story, Minogue hinted that the 1994 marriage—she wore a tiara to the Melbourne ceremony—was bedevilled by the influence of Lady McMahon, who died in April aged 77. The book, Minogue told Britain’s Daily Mail, covers “dealing with a very, very difficult ex-mother-in-law” who would leave her sitting outside in the car while Nip/Tuck star McMahon, 42, visited the family’s Sydney home. Of the short-lived union, Minogue said, “I’m not a vicious person, but with something that happened to me and how people behaved around me, you just tell it how it is.”

The positives? Her 1995 sold-out Playboy cover, which gave her flagging finances (she said she was about £150,000 in the hole) and self-esteem a boost, and her 1997 boob job—the only cosmetic surgery she ’fesses to. She introduced “the girls” to producer friend Terry Ronald on the set of Top of the Pops, and her manager, Terry Blamey, walked in to find Ronald nodding appreciatively and “cupping my boobs.”

But the best addition to Minogue’s life is “Mr Handsome,” model and TV host Smith, who she thought might be gay when they met in Ibiza’s Space nightclub three years ago. Minogue, who vowed after splitting with Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve in 2001 not to lose herself in a man again, asked him for a kiss at midnight. “I had such a strong feeling about this guy,” she wrote. “I fell for him then and there.”

Dannii on:

Lady (Sonia) McMahon
The late society doyenne, Minogue writes, “wanted nothing to do with me. I simply wasn’t good enough.” She spoke about her marriage last October on British TV, saying, “I really wish I could see what some of those other people saw, that this isn’t going to work.”

Big sister Kylie
In the 1990s Minogue faced a “barrage” of comparisons to her big sister (in London in 2006): “Isn’t Kylie bloody fabulous? And isn’t Dannii tragic?” The gibes never affected their close bond, she writes: “The truth of the matter is I never felt like I was competing with my sister. I am and always have been so very proud of Kylie, and she is of me.”

Nemesis Sharon Osbourne
In My Story, Minogue compares working on The X Factor with Sharon Osbourne to “being forced to sit next to the school bully.” Her claim that a “ranting” Osbourne, 57, made her cry before their first live show in 2007 was slammed by Sharon’s daughter Kelly, but Minogue told X magazine, “If she’s calling me a liar, she’s calling everyone who was there a liar. The producers and everyone. There were a lot of witnesses.”