Kylie Minogue promotes her new album 'X' in Berlin. Photo / Reuters
Kylie Minogue promotes her new album 'X' in Berlin. Photo / Reuters
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LONDON - A documentary about Kylie Minogue's battle with breast cancer has gone to air in Britain, showing dramatic footage of the pop star's collapse during a show in Manchester.
Footage from the concert, filmed before her diagnosis, shows a distressed Minogue trying desperately not to cry asshe walks the stage trying to make it through one more song.
But the diminutive singer is forced backstage, where she collapses, crying, as her team try to comfort her and cool her as she lies crumpled on the floor.
"I hate to let you all down but I'm just going to do one more song," Minogue, wearing a skin-tight catsuit, tells the audience.
But she simply could not go on.
"I was really weak, dizzy and couldn't sing," she says in the documentary White Diamond: A Personal Portrait of Kylie Minogue, which aired last night in Britain.
"I was hyperventilating and panicking and in tears and then we stopped and there was this gap that seemed like it went forever.
"At the end of the medley I go through the back doors and at the top of the stairs I just sat there and burst into tears with my head in my hands.
"Let alone the tour, everything just collapsed. Everything. The world kinds of stopped spinning."
Footage shows a limp Minogue being carried by a security guard back to her dressing room, eyes closed and her head lying heavily against the man's shoulder.
At the time of the collapse, Minogue did not know she had breast cancer and says she was distressed about feeling so unwell.
"The last time I was really ill on the stage was before I was diagnosed so I had a lot of, kind of, I felt really um pummelled. I was quite tormented in fact."
During the documentary she pays tribute to the support she received from her now ex boyfriend, Paris-born actor Oliver Martinez, after her May 2005 diagnosis.
"Ollie was amazing I have to say, really supportive through Showgirl 1, and was with me when I was diagnosed," she said.
"I have learnt that when the going gets tough, or in a crisis, you learn a lot about people. And I, I can't tell people enough, how amazing he was."
Kylie had since recovered and has launched a comeback with a new album X. Minogue and Martinez split amid media reports that he had been unfaithful.
