Neighbours stars Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan come full circle
As fresh-faced actors, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan painted a sunny picture of two stars on the rise. We look back at some of their highlight moments — and the things they said.
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Their iconic characters, Scott and Charlene, will return to where it all began — older, wiser and probably bemused at what they said, all those years ago.
Indeed, the Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan files paint a fresh-faced, sunny and optimistic picture of two stars on the rise, especially during their peak, as lovers, then a married couple, on Ramsay Street, in 1987.
“There’s not enough time!” Kylie squawked when asked if she wanted to walk down the aisle in real life.
“I’m sure if I’d met the right guy I’d be married by now, but there’s too many things to do at the moment. I don’t want to be tied down with a ring on my finger at 19. I want to travel the world.”
She definitely did that. And never married. And became a pop superstar to boot.
Back then, Kylie earned $300 an episode, drove a Toyota hatchback and took her washing home to her mum.
She and Jason eventually dated, but denied the tryst despite sightings from Tottenham to Toorak to Tahiti.
“It’s lucky Jason and I get along as we do so much work together. But there’s never been a romance,” Kylie said. “We’re just good friends.”
Thirty-five years on, their loving looks on the finale episode of Neighbours confirm that friendship still shines brightly.
Meanwhile, here are some highlights from the Kylie and Jason files, 1987-89.
KYLIE ON THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
“Aids is changing the world,’’ Kylie said in an interview about her TV wedding. “It’s bringing back monogamy, which I think is a good thing. People are going to be much more careful and much more aware. Women know that they have just as many sexual rights as men. Nowadays, it’s not up to the man to invite a women to bed, she might be the one to ask him.’’
KYLIE’S MOMENT OF SELF-REFLECTION
“I’ve never thought of myself as pretty and in some ways I’m really old-fashioned,’’ she said.
“It has crossed my mind that I could be getting overexposed at the moment, but I’m letting things take their course. I’m fully aware I could be a nobody tomorrow.
Andrew Watt, who authored a Kylie book, said: “She is ridiculously normal.”
Minogue told Watt she was a shy child, interested in handicrafts, and made her own dress for the 1986 Logies.
Her former manager Terry Blamey said: “She has, like no one else I’ve ever seen before, a power to project her real personality to a camera. There are millions of nice people, but here’s one who actually made it”.
KYLIE’S CASH
Kylie was paid $300 an episode for acting in Neighbours when she was 19.
But her 1987 earnings overall were rumoured to be $1m, most of it from a recording career and personal appearances.
She didn’t have a splashy lifestyle and wasn’t a big-spender.
“I am still a normal teenager,” Kylie said. “I go home to Mum and she cooks the dinner. I cook, but only simple things. I like making desserts.’’
She bought a modest three-bedroom suburban house near her parents as an investment.
Her only “”extravagance’’ during a trip to London was to buy a pair of boots.
“I was out shopping with a girlfriend and we went into a store,” Kylie said. “A woman came in and said “Neighbours sucks’ and walked out. I was astounded. I thought “Who cares what you think? If you don’t like the show, don’t watch it.’’’
Rebuffing questions about her wealth, Minogue added: “I don’t want to tell you how much I am worth, but I am doing great for my age. Money is important, but it is not the be all and end all.”
JASON’S JUICE
While Kylie kept mum on money matters, poor Jason was forced to deny he had asked Channel 10 for a $7000-a-week pay rise.
“I am currently negotiating a new contract, but that figure is totally inaccurate,” he said at Tullamarine airport after returning from London in 1987.
“The whole thing has been blown up. You know what the Fleet Street press are like.”
A Channel 10 spokeswoman said: “All the Neighbours stars are paid basically the same rate, according to experience. As contracts are coming up ... people would have put in for pay rises.”
ROOK(IE) ERA
Kylie’s first backlash came via the poison pen of famed Fleet Street columnist Jean Rook.
Minogue’s mistake was to step off a 24-hour flight in London looking understandably dishevelled, then hiding behind her security team to avoid unflattering photos.
An unimpressed Rook wrote: “Maybe getting off a plane looking as if you’ve just crawled out of a kangaroo’s pouch is Australian style. Kylie Minogue’s disappointing arrival at Heathrow was worse than just the sloppily dressed girl next door. She looked like a slept-in Qantas blanket.
“If you’re going to make a dramatic entry with a couple of hefty-handed minders the size of Ayers Rock, you should at least live up and dress up to it — not scuttle through the airport like a filthy-mooded funnel-web spider in dark glasses, downtrodden baseball shoes and jacket and a hairdo that looked as if it had been pulled backwards through the Coral Reef,” Rook added.
“Miss Minogue ... risks becoming a burnt-out old crocodile handbag.”
Amanda Pelman, from Kylie’s record label Mushroom, made her checkmate move on Rook with this almighty zinger: “A burnt-out old crocodile handbag like Rook can hardly speak”.
Kylie was shaken, but not stirred.
“When you reach a certain height you have to be pulled down,’’ she said.
“I could resign myself to that fact and say, ‘Well, the time has come when I had better go and hide’. But you have to learn not to worry. I only value the opinions of people who matter to me, like my friends and family.’’
CONFIDE IN SHE
Kylie and Jason consistently denied they were an item, then suddenly, to nobody’s surprise, it was official.
“Jason and I have been good friends since we were 12 (They both starred in Skyways before Neighbours),” Kylie said.
“Even if I was going out with Jason, I would not admit it. There are some things I believe you should keep private. And that is the part of me I want to keep to myself.
“Let’s just say that Jason and I are close friends.”
She added “I get a lot of people trying to date me, but that’s only because I am famous.
“I am no angel, I have had boyfriends in the past. And I do want to get married, but that can be put on hold — my career can’t.”
DONOVAN DISS
Jason also had a denial to make.
“People have said I have just jumped on the bandwagon and followed Kylie Minogue, which is not at all the case,’’ he said after clocking on at the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory.
“Kylie didn’t influence me at all. She has her career and I have mine. We aren’t involved with each other’s careers.
“I could have had a single out before Kylie but I wanted it to be right.’’
He added: “A lot of people have said the single was not arty enough but I don’t really care what they say. I don’t profess to be a John Farnham or a Jimmy Barnes, but then they weren’t as good as they are now when they first started”.
21 CANDLES
Kylie celebrated her 21st birthday at the Red Eagle restaurant.
She wore a black lace mini and stockings with a 1940s hairdo.
Jason rocked up to the party in his old-style Mercedes sports sedan, JD100.
Months later, Kylie left the set of her first movie, The Delinquents, and caught a late night flight to Melbourne for Jason’s 21st.
Jason and his school friends from De La Salle College in Malvern danced the night away to top 40 hits.
Three of Jason’s old school mates caused a stir when they sang Do The Prostitution — a spoof on Kylie’s hit, Do The Locomotion.
In a sign of the times, waiters at the party wore white t-shirts and red bandannas.
NO TELL HOTEL
Their hit duet, Especially For You, sounded like confirmation of conscious coupling.
But after so many forthright denials, Jason’s tell-all that he and Kylie consummated their relationship at a Travelodge was bizarre to say the least.
“She chased me and then I guess I gradually gave in. The next thing you know we were working and having this relationship,” he told British broadcaster Piers Morgan in 2012.
“At the time it was great. We cemented it in a Sydney Travelodge. Travelodges in those days were posh places.”
He said she was his first love and there was “a lot of chemistry between us” but he knew it would come to an end as she started to become more successful than him.
He said: “I could see her slipping away. We argued a lot about her wanting to go off and do other things”.
Jason said Kylie dumped him via a phone call.
By then, she had met INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
“For a male, it’s a difficult thing to deal with to be dropped by a woman, but not only a woman but someone of her status. I took it hard,” Jason said.
“But you move on. I never went to an INXS concert after that.”
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