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KYLIE Minogue last night lured her seldom-seen parents into the spotlight as she received one of France's highest cultural honours.

Melburnians Ron and Carol Minogue joined their daughter as French Culture Minister Christine Albanel lavished praised on their daughter over her fight against breast cancer.

At a ceremony in Paris, Ms Albanel bestowed on the 39-year-old the title of Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) and told her she was a "Midas of the international music scene who turns everything she touches into gold".

"I want to publicly salute the courage you showed by revealing publicly that you had breast cancer," the minister said. "Doctors now even go as far as saying there is a 'Kylie effect' that encourages young women to have regular checks."

Minogue kicks off a European concert tour in Paris today.

Past recipients of the French award include singers Bob Dylan and David Bowie and Hollywood stars George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

Minogue in December was decorated in the Queen's New Year honours list with an OBE.

She said she was "deeply honoured" to be given the French award.

"French culture has influenced me greatly and I have always had colossal respect for the arts and people of France."

Writer Frank Deasy and stars James Nesbitt, Ben Daniels and Joseph Mawle tell Serena Davies about a revisionist retelling of the final week in the life of Christ

Starting on Palm Sunday and concluding on Easter Sunday, BBC1 is retelling the story, in four hour-long instalments, of the last week in the life of Jesus Christ. In this new version, Mary Magdalene isn’t a prostitute, the character of Mary, mother of Jesus, has been inspired by a modern Irish schoolteacher, and Caiaphas – the Jewish High Priest who asked Pontius Pilate to crucify Christ – comes across as a surprisingly likeable fellow.

This big-budget, painstakingly researched drama will convey the Easter story from three different points of view: that of Jesus and the disciples, that of Caiaphas, and that of Pilate. If the characters emerge differently from how they come across in the Gospels, it is because scriptwriter Frank Deasy (the Emmy award-winning writer of the final episode of Prime Suspect) and his cast, which includes James Nesbitt (Murphy’s Law) as Pilate and Ben Daniels (The State Within) as Caiaphas, have been at pains to anchor the story in historical realism.

James Nesbitt stars as Pontius Pilate
“This is the week in which Jesus moves from being a relatively unknown preacher from Galilee to being a defining figure in Western culture,” says Deasy. “It’s quite a tale. And the way we’ve tried to do it is to really explore what was going on.

“Why was what Jesus was saying and doing in Jerusalem so incendiary during that week of Passover? Why was it politically and theologically so contentious for the Jewish temple priests? And what was the Roman Pilate’s point of view, as he tried to manage this unruly city state during the busiest religious festival of the year?” The effect of Deasy’s use of multiple viewpoints, says Ben Daniels, is to “take what we know and shine a new light on it. When I first read the script I thought anything might happen. Jesus might not have been crucified. It’s that thing when you watch Romeo and Juliet and you think, ‘Maybe she’ll wake up’. If the story’s well told, you think it can go in any direction.”

Where Deasy has taken a revisionist approach to the characters, it has been carefully thought through. The Gospels never describe Mary Magdalene as a prostitute – that was an interpretation of later eras – and scholars now believe she may have been a wealthy supporter of Jesus instead. While taking into consideration the trials Jesus’s mother endured (Mary is played here by the superb Penelope Wilton), Deasy says he has given her some of the same maternal toughness he sees in his own mother, an Irish schoolteacher.

And as for the much-maligned Caiaphas, historians have discovered that he presided over an exceptionally long era of peace in Jerusalem. Many of his contemporaries would have viewed Caiaphas as a good leader even if, as Ben Daniels puts it, “every other interpretation we’ve seen has pictured him either as a very unreligious sort of man – or virtually satanic.”

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At the heart of this production, of course, is Jesus. He is played by Joseph Mawle, a relative unknown compared to some of his co-stars, but an actor who achieved acclaim in BBC2’s 2006 crime thriller Soundproof. Mawle is 33 – supposedly the same age as Jesus when He was crucified.

Understandably, Mawle was somewhat overawed to get the part. He describes the period leading up to filming as, “not quite 40 days in the wilderness, but a couple of months of panic.” Which is not a million miles away from the response James Nesbitt had to the project. “It was exciting to get a chance to retell the story,” he says. “Even if you do have the weight of 2,000 years of history upon you.”

To add to the pressure, the elaborate shoot was filmed in Morocco at the height of summer, with temperatures touching 45 degrees. “On one of the first big days of shooting,” remembers Mawle, “we were doing a scene in the market-place. We had 500 sheep, 300 birds, two camels, 19 main cast, hundreds of extras, 170 crew…” Sadly, not all the stars were cooperative. “We had a lot of trouble with the donkey,” Mawle chuckles. “It had a mind of its own. If it had a voice, I’m sure it would have been Eddie Murphy’s [who voiced the character of Donkey in the Shrek films]. It trod on every single one of the disciples’ feet at one time or another!”

The donkey was evidently unaware of the significance of the story it was helping to tell. Frank Deasy, however, hopes The Passion will restore a sense of holiness to the tale that its most recent celluloid retelling, Mel Gibson’s “brutal” The Passion of the Christ, decidedly lacked. “I suppose if that film influenced me in any way it was to reach for a more spiritual and a more tender Jesus,” he says. “A more loving Jesus.”

“That sounds terribly sugary – and I wish I hadn’t said it now,” Deasy adds, with a laugh. But the the novelty of Deasy’s version of the Passion is confined to subtle shifts of emphasis and characterisation – unlike Gibson’s visual onslaught of blood and guts. And that will strike many viewers as a blessed relief in itself.