Dannii Minogue — 'Kris is a super dad'

The first time I met Dannii Minogue was long before she reinvented herself with her cute little bob and moveable brows to become an international TV personality on Australia’s Got Talent and Britain’s The X Factor … No, it was long before that.

She was struggling with a record deal and was fighting the perception that she was the B-side to Kylie’s A-side.

When I say fighting, she wasn’t fighting with Kylie because they’ve always been spectacularly close.

Similar in many ways. They work hard, they don’t show their pain. Yet it all got a bit too much when Dannii was seen as simply the gateway to Kylie when Kylie was sick and cancer-stricken. Quite interestingly, both of them became survivors in a new way.

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I’m happy to say that the first time I met the then-struggling Dannii she made sure she sparkled. She wore great shoes and gleamed alpha woman from every pore.

She’s tiny, of course, but don’t expect any baby animal vulnerability. She’d already been through a lot. She never let it get her down, it just made her strong.

Today, it’s just the same, even though there are rumours everything is not going quite so golden. She recently had to quit British TV (temporarily at least) when she had to give up Simon Cowell’s The X Factor because of scheduling conflicts with Australia’s Got Talent.

And there are reports that her relationship with Kris Smith, father of 11-month-old Ethan and boyfriend of three years (they met at Space nightclub in Ibiza in summer 2008) is in trouble. If so, she’d never want to admit it even to herself.

She might concede that after a fairytale reinvention, millions of dollars and taking to motherhood in a way that no one believed possible, Dannii had to step off the cloud for just a little while to sort herself out.

Nobody imagined that Dannii would be so revolutionised by pregnancy and motherhood. Even her big sister Kylie never had her down as broody.

“A transformation happened when she got pregnant,” Kylie says. “It just shows that we can never predict anything because by her own admission she would say she didn’t know if she wanted to have kids. She didn’t know if she was the maternal type, but she is.”

Dannii herself nods. “It’s true. I wasn’t broody. Definitely not. I never had that ticking clock. [She’s now 39.] It was just that my relationship with Kris got to the point where it was something that I really wanted to do with him.

“I took a lot of convincing. I always knew Kris would be a great dad. I saw him with my brother Brendan’s kids, so calm and so confident. I had never been around newborns. In fact, it grossed me out. All the clichés of new parents are true. When it’s your own, you just do it.”

She’s absolutely delighted with baby Ethan. He slept through the night from three months.

“I’ve gone from not being bothered about being a mum to being quite keen to have a second baby,” she says.

Kris has made no secret of the fact that he wants a brood and, fortunately for Dannii, he loved her being pregnant. “Every time I ask him how many he wants, it goes up. We bought a seven-seater family car and he’s looking to fill it. I’m very lucky. Kris is a super dad.”

Read more of this story in the July issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.