She began her career as actress in the 1990s playing Beth Brennan in Australian soap opera Neighbours, spending two years on the soap before leaving to begin a singing career. In 1997, she scored her Signature Song with her cover of Ednaswap's "Torn", and sold seven million copies of her debut album later that year, Left In The Middle. Her subsequent albums have combined sales of three million copies worldwide, and her accolades include eight ARIA Awards, two Brit Awards, one Billboard Music Award, and three Grammy nominations. As an actress, she has appeared in several films, most notably playing agent Lorna Campbell in the 2003 spy spoof Johnny English. After a six-year hiatus, she returned to music in 2021 with Firebird. In 2022, she won the third series of The Masked Singer (UK) as the Panda.
Discography
- Left of the Middle (1997)
- White Lilies Island (2001)
- Counting Down the Days (2005)
- Came to Life (2009)
- Male (2015)
- Firebird (2021)
Her work contains examples of:
- Action Girl: As Lorna Campbell in Johnny English.
- Back for the Finale: Reprised her role as Beth Brennan for the Series Fauxnale (though fully intended to be the finale at the time) of Neighbours. Amusingly, working Beth into the story, even at the level of the episode's other cameos, evidently caused some complications: most of the cameos were recorded messages to congratulate two long-running characters on their wedding, but Beth had never met either of them, and had almost no other connection to the then-current cast.
- Broken Pedestal: The protagonist's boyfriend in "Torn" is a form of this. She initially thought he was a kind and warm person (and he may even have been originally,) only to find out he was really just an uncaring jerk, and that's why she's breaking up with him.
- Cover Album: Male, in which she covered songs by male performers including "Instant Crush", "Friday I'm In Love" and "I Will Follow You Into The Dark".
- Cover Version: In addition to all the songs on Male, "Torn" (which became her
Signature Song) and her duet of INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart" with Tom Jones. - Former Child Star: From Neighbours, which she started on at age 16.
- Gender Flip: Male is a Cover Album based around this concept, in which she covers songs by male artists.
