In the movie, after Ewan McGregor drinks absinthe for the first time, he has a vision of a small emerald sprite, which announces, “I’m the Green Fairy!” and flies about, sprinkling pixie dust and warbling “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” The fairy is clearly played by Kylie Minogue–and it sounds like her too. If the vocals came from Ozzy, he had to be sucking down helium before the foley session. At the very end of the hallucination, however, Kylie’s eyes turn red and she screams–and that scream sounds like the Prince of Fuckin’ Darkness. “I feel that Kylie’s contribution to the film is certainly undercredited,” Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann told me via email. “The high clear ‘Sound of Music’ in a quasi-operatic style is Kylie–who I have to say has more vocal dexterity than people could imagine. The scream at the very end is in fact Ozzy Osbourne. The story behind this is that at one stage I had a much more complicated sequence where the innocent Green Fairy metamorphoses into its darker demonic alter-ego. With the ever-helpful Sharon Osbourne, we recorded Ozzy doing ‘The Sound of Music’ for that sequence–but we ended up cutting down his incredible vocal to a brief scream.”

(Excerpted from the 2006 book Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed, published by Three Rivers Press, written by Gavin Edwards.)