Another famous Aussie Pop Diva who made a successful transition from popular soap opera star to celebrated singer is Natalie Imbruglia.
Imbruglia gained national fame in the early 1990s when she played the character Beth Brennan in the popular Australian soap opera Neighbours from 1992-94. Three years after she left the show her singing career was launched with a highly successful debut single Torn from the Album Left of the Middle.
The single was an instant success and became one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, and her debut album Left of the Middle sold more than 6 million copies worldwide and remained in the United Kingdom charts for 81 weeks.
The single reached No. 2 in the UK Singles Chart, No. 1 on the Billboard Airplay chart for 14 weeks and sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. It broke the record of the highest-selling debut album by a pop/rock/alternative female artist in its first week, according to Billboard.
She went on to record albums White Lilies Island, Counting Down the Days, Glorious: The singles 97-08 and Come to Life. While these albums didn’t achieve the same huge success as her debut album, she has sold more than 9 million albums worldwide and was ranked No. 11 on Rock on the Net’s list of Single Artists of the Year in 1998 and No. 76 in 2001.
“When I first started, I was known as an actor crossing over to music and it was not really a popular move at the time,” she said in a March 2014 interview with a reporter from CraveOnline.
“I remember feeling like I had an uphill battle ahead of me. The stars aligned and I got lucky on my first single…when I first started song writing. I was on a soap opera and there were a lot of people on that soap trying to do music, some which were good and some which weren’t very good. At the time it wasn’t really a credible move so in some ways I was an underdog. It worked out in the end though.”
Imbruglia has also appeared on many major magazine covers including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Bazaar, New Idea, Who, Cleo, GQ, Ralph, Marie Claire and Women’s Own.
She has made many screen appearances since her days of Neighbours including being a judge on Australia’s X Factor for the 2010 season. After X Factor Imbruglia moved to the United States.
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