When Kylie’s cancer returned, she kept the news to herself. This is why

Kylie Minogue has revealed she is in remission after her cancer returned in 2021.

The announcement was tied to the end of the third part of her documentary, Kylie, which lands on Netflix today.

When Minogue was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, the news made headlines across the world and reporters tracked every increment of her journey, including while she sought intensive chemotherapy in Paris.

This part of her life was deeply hinted at in the Netflix trailer, when a portion of it was dedicated to a montage of the coverage of her cancer.

So the second time around, she decided to fight the battle in private and take ownership of announcing the news herself.

“I don’t feel obliged to tell the world,” Minogue says in the docuseries, teary-eyed. “And actually, I couldn’t at the time because I was just a shell of a person.”

While Minogue has not shared whether it was her breast cancer that returned, she spoke about how she kept working as her diagnosis weighed heavily in the backdrop – particularly when she wrote her song Story for her 2023 album Tension.

“I had a secret that I kept to myself, yeah,” she sings live in the docuseries, shakily. “I had a one-way ticket that was going nowhere.”

In the documentary, she describes feeling “removed” from her body when she was first diagnosed with cancer. “I was so scared of what was ahead of me,” she says.

“We didn’t know if she was ever going to be well again,” her sister, Dannii, says in a separate interview for the documentary. “But I just wanted to be with my sister.

“Music kept us going.”

On May 18, Minogue stepped out onto the red carpet for the docuseries launch, flanked by Dannii and former Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan, who appears in the show along with musician Nick Cave and music producer Pete Waterman.