Acting

Musicals

2009-01-02T14:47:00.000-08:00

Grease – The Arena
Spectacular (Australia, Arenas all states - 1999)

Another form of acting are musicals. It's theatre with music.

Everyone knows of Grease, the 70's hit movie feat Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta.

Dannii was offered to play the leading role Sandy but turned it down.

In stead Dannii played her favourite movie character, ‘Rizzo’ in the Australian production of Grease - the Arena Spectacular 1998.

This hosted over 66 Arena shows, to more than 500,000 in its first season.

It became the most successful tour in Australian Entertainment history!

Notre Dame De Paris

Dannii played the lead, Esmeralda, for five sell-out months, in Notre Dame de Paris at the Dominion Theatre.

Chart topping singer and world wide sex symbol, Dannii Minogue thrilled audiences with her debut performance in the West End last year. In February 2001, Dannii joined the hit show Notre-Dame de Paris as Esmeralda at the Dominion Theatre, bringing her many talents to the role. Dannii’s performance combined her singing, acting and dancing skills. She performed a host of songs including the hit single "Live For the One I Love". Set on a magnificent, moving stage, Dannii was joined by a highly talented cast of singers, actors and energetic acrobats that created a stage show unlike any other.

Notre-Dame de Paris was a mesmerising melodrama that combined the sexiness and edginess of a rock concert and the energy of an acrobatic spectacle with a strong, heartbreaking story that captured every theatre-goers heart.
Based on Victor Hugo's novel, Notre-Dame de Paris told the story of the hunchback Quasimodo and his love for the beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda. She had also captured the heart of the machiavellian priest Frollo but she had fallen in love with the handsome Kings cavalry captain, Pheobus. With sexual jealousy and passions rife, Notre-Dame de Paris culminated in the tragic death of Esmeralda and her loyal Quasimodo.

Dannii in her award winning role singing 'Live for the one I love'

The theatre actress

2009-01-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

Lady MacBeth
In September 1999, Dannii like Judi Dench and Jane Horrocks before her, tackled one of the most demanding and sought after Shakespearian roles - Lady MacBeth. And just to prove that all the world is indeed a stage, she's did it outdoors!

Gough claims that casting Dannii wasn't just a headline-grabbing play; it was the fulfillment of a long-cherished hope. 'I couldn't think of anyone better to play the part,' he asserts. 'I've always wanted to work with her, and I've been planning to do this show at the Festival for years. So when I asked her if she wanted to have a stab - as the saying goes! - and she agreed to do it, it was a dream bit of casting for me.'

'It wasn't daunting; it was intriguing,' Dannii said. It was the freedom Gough offered her to develop hew character as she saw fit that convinced her to take the role.
'I'm very fussy not only about what role I play but also about the production and the style in which it's done. Toby has a unique vision. There was no way I was going to waste my time coming up to Edinburgh and doing something that's been done before.
The Lady MacBeth I play will be Dannii Minogue's Lady MacBeth, and when people see it they'll know that it couldn't possibly be anyone else.'

Spoken like a born theatrical diva. Dannii's approach is not that of a giggly rent-a-celeb adding glitz and tits to a production beyond her intellectual scope; she takes the project, and herself, very seriously indeed.
'I'm not going to please everyone. If I worried about what people thought, I'd still be living in Australia and I never would have tried anything.
'It's good for people to see me in a different light; it expands their minds. people constantly want to pigeonhole me, to say I'm just a TV presenter, not just a singer, not just an actress. I'm not just anything. I'm a whole bunch of things and I keep pushing myself to be as diverse as I can, because it interests me. It goes along with my personality - diving straight into things, doing something completely full-on in the greatest possible depth.' Dannii said.

Tody Gouch sees Dannii as a natural Lady MacBeth, describing her as 'a fantastic performer with fantastic sexuality and fantastic guts.' Does Dannii feel any kinship with that most driven and determined of leading ladies? 'Ohh ... it would be a pretty broad thing to say I identified with her. Everyone has determination - it's a question of how you use it. Hers is based on power and success and conquering; she doesn't care what she has to do or who gets hurt in the process. In that way we're very, very different. I'm not living for when I have a Number One record or when I make a million trillion dollars. I'm not doing this to get somewhere else.
I'm doing it because I'm doing it.'

The Vagina Monologues
Dannii starred in the west end play July 31 2001.

When I did the Vagina Monologues, that was the first bit of comedy I’d ever done. You don’t realise you love it until you try it… it’s like some kind of drug! You say something and then you know people are going to laugh.

About the play
Eve Ensler (Author) is an award winning playwright, poet, activist, and screenwriter. Her many works for the stage include The Depot, Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Ladies, Scooncat and Lemonade. Her play Necessary Targets has had benefit performances on Broadway, at the National Theatre in Sarajevo, and at the Kennedy Centre and opened in London in the Spring of 2001. Her newest play, Conviction, was commissioned by Music-Theatre group and was performed at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.The Vagina Monologues won a 1997 Obie Award and was nominated for Drama Desk and Helen Hayes awards. The world tour of the Vagina Monologues initiated V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women. Ms. Ensler's best-selling book of The Vagina Monologues was published by Villard Books.

She also starred in:
Les Monologues de Vagin (Folies Bergere, Paris, Theatre)
V-Day (Royal Albert Hall, London, Theatre - 2002)

The big screen

2009-01-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

Secrets - Australia

Dannii has also been on the big screen.

In 1991 she starred in Secrets.

Five of The Beatles' biggest fans in Australia get locked up in the basement of the hotel where the Fab Four are staying during a tour. While waiting for rescue, they start to share their deepest secrets with each other.

The Porter Mercedes -benz shortfilm

U.K 2004

Jeff Stewart works as a porter in a 5-star hotel. His job is to park the guests' cars.

A daily routine- until the day he takes out a customer's car from the hotel garage and finds accidentally a stash of valuable diamonds in it. Jeff becomes the target of the Hungarian secret police, a gang of smugglers and a mysterious beauty.

Watch the movie online here

The breakthrough

2009-01-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

Home & Away
In 1989 to 1990 Dannii starred as Emma Jackson in her first major tv role written especially for her and thanks to her, the soap became an international hit. Home & Away is today Australia's biggest soap and has won awards, recently TV week logies 2007 for best soap.

Dannii moved to the U.K and she became a mega star.
Tough fiesty and to begin with, gothic Emma, was loved by the British audience.

An actress is born

2009-01-02T14:03:00.000-08:00

After YTT, Dannii landed a part in All the way 1988.
It was Dannii's first acting job starring as Penny Seymour in this 16 part tv series in Australia which featured the lives of three families in the 1960s.

The first roles

2009-01-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

Dannii made her debut as a little actress only 7 years old on the popular soap series Skyways in Australia, June 1978.

Later that year in October, she also appeared in another soap, The Sullivans.
(video coming soon)

But in 1979 she auditioned for Young Talent Time, the biggest variety show in Australia, and stayed there till 1988. Her main job was to sing and dance, but she also acted in various sketches on the show.