Kylie is left 'inconsolable' after splitting from wannabe actor 20 years her junior: At 48, she was finally getting married and deliriously happy - but now her heart is shattered 

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Her countless fans already hail her as the sexiest woman on the planet. 

And now we know that Kylie Minogue — who has abruptly ended her relationship with the man she was set to marry, after reports that she suspected he had cheated on her — is one of the classiest, too.

Taking to Instagram yesterday, she posted a picture of a beautiful sunrise with the words: 'Thank you for your love and understanding with the news that Josh and I have decided to go our separate ways. We wish only the best for each other as we venture towards new horizons.'

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Kylie Minogue with Joshua Sasse in London at a party last year for the world premiere Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

These noble words are testimony to Kylie's great self-control. Not for nothing is this 5ft pop survivor known as a Tinkerbell with a core of titanium.

Privately, though, she is said to be 'inconsolable and utterly heartbroken' over the apparent betrayal by the man she adored, Joshua Sasse.

For despite their considerable age gap (she is nearly 50 while he is not quite 30), Kylie believed that after an 18-month romance they were on the brink of marriage — her first — and a happy ever after.

On her part at least, she left no one in any doubt that it felt like the real thing.

'I go all gooey at the mention of him,' she said last year.

Only three weeks ago she was talking about changing her name from Minogue to Sasse when they were married. 'Kylie Sasse is a great name!' she said. 'I'll definitely change to Sasse.'

Indeed, there seemed to be little Kylie wouldn't do for her handsome British beau.

Keen to help him break into the big time, last year she paid for Sasse — whose luxuriant beard masks the fact he is thinning on top — to have a £5,000 hair transplant. All the better, surely, to help launch him into Hollywood and, in particular, the role of the young Han Solo in the as yet untitled new Star Wars prequel for which he auditioned.

Kylie pictured during a conversation with a friend in a Sydney hotel last November 

Sasse did not get the part — but Kylie's devotion did not wane.

She picked a recording of Joshua reading a poem as one of her Desert Island Discs in 2015 and marked his birthday on December 9 last year by getting 5,000 of her fans to sing him Happy Birthday while performing at the Royal Albert Hall.

She fell for him completely. It was very intense,' said one source who discussed the romance with Kylie, 48. 'Some of us were unsure about him, but she loved him with her whole heart.'

However, she has now kicked him out of her house in Chelsea amid reports that he had became close to Spanish actress Marta Milans, his co-star in a TV series.

They got to know each other while making the show No Tomorrow in Vancouver. Filming started in August and ended in December. A source who worked on the show said that it was 'well known' on set that he and Miss Milans had been close for a couple of months.

Miss Milans, 34, who is from a wealthy Spanish family, has yet to comment. Her brother Alfonso said yesterday that he had: 'No idea at all,' about any liaison.

Meanwhile, a friend of Kylie's said that trouble was certainly on the horizon as she and Sasse 'hardly saw each other' for a long period last year. In an interview a few weeks ago, Kylie said that she had spent months making a film, Flammable Children, in Australia while Sasse was in Canada.

She said: 'Joshua is old-school and a romantic. He would write letters on paper with beautiful ink. He puts wax on the back of the envelopes and seals the letters. He also has an old typewriter that he uses, which I love.

'I wrote letters back to him. It felt like a very beautiful way to communicate.'

Perhaps so, but there were signs that the appeal of the separation had been wearing thin. Kylie is said to have had a series of rows with Sasse, 29, and was pictured looking distraught and tearful in a hotel in Sydney in November last year.

Kylie kicked him out of her house in Chelsea amid reports that he had became close to Spanish actress Marta Milans (pictured), his co-star in a TV series.

Some said that the romance was 'tempestuous' from the beginning, and friends of Kylie were yesterday using words like 'moody' to describe him.

It was even said that he was a 'controlling' presence in her life — an assertion which is given some weight by her comments in an interview last month in which she called him 'very passionate and opinionated'.

She added: 'He has a different view on things to me, and I love that because he makes me look at life in a different way. Sometimes I think he's right, sometimes I think he's wrong.'

Rumours are rife that more allegations about his behaviour in the relationship are about to come to light.

A source said: 'I don't think she knows a lot of the things about him which are going to come out. I think she is going to be shocked.'

Kylie's suspicions about handsome Sasse, a former public school boy of the £33,750-a-year Shrewsbury School, only came to a head after she returned from a trip to Paris Fashion week a fortnight ago.

Feeling that she could 'no longer trust him', she asked him to leave her home.

The source explained: 'It was in Paris that Kylie became suspicious and returned to London to confront Joshua. She immediately asked him to leave her home, which he had moved into at the start of the relationship.'

The news of their parting has sparked a global wave of abuse aimed at Sasse, the son of a poet.

'She is clearly better than you and that god-awful beard,' one enraged Kylie fan wrote on his Instagram account. Others called him a 'moron' and worse.

Holed up at his mother's house in Herefordshire yesterday, Sasse kept his own counsel, looking thunderous as he made a trip out in a Range Rover. His sister Lydia, a yoga instructor in Dublin, declined to comment.

Handsome, bearded and oh-so-ambitious, Joshua Sasse swept Kylie off her dainty feet when they met in the summer of 2015.

Kylie Minogue and Joshua Sasse attend one of her shows at The Ivy in December last year

Kylie whilst in London last year. Serial monogamist Kylie had been single for some time after exiting a five-year romance with Spanish model Andres Velencoso in September 2013

After a heady 18-month romance, the couple became officially engaged in February 2016, placing an announcement in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

There were rumours that they had married in secret last summer, but in October they announced that they would not do so until gay marriage was made legal in Australia.

Born in London, Sasse's maternal great-grandfather was the 1st Viscount Camrose and his maternal uncles were the 2nd Viscount Camrose and Baron Hartwell, former owner of the Daily Telegraph. His father was the poet Dominic Sasse, who married Mary Macauley — Viscount Camrose's granddaughter — in 1978.

Daughter Lydia came first, followed five years later by Joshua, and for a time the family lived in Nepal. When he was five his father was tragically killed in the PIA air crash at Kathmandu in 1992. The family moved back to Ludlow, Shropshire.

Joshua said in an interview: 'It was pretty weird. We went back to our house in England which I hadn't been in before and I said to my mum: 'I don't like this hotel.'

'I'd been barefoot for five years and went to get my first pair of shoes at five years [old]. So there was a bit of a transition.'

Joshua was sent to Shrewsbury School and later went to Hurtwood House in Surrey, a sixth form for performing arts. He then studied at a theatre training school in Exeter — no prestigious RADA or LAMDA for him.

Even in these early years he had a bit of a reputation as one of the most popular and handsome of his peers.

'I'm always off travelling and doing something fairly dangerous,' he has said. 'Which is probably why I get into so much trouble, because I am the naughty one.'

Fittingly, perhaps, his first role was in a British gangster film called The Big I Am in 2010. He then took the role of Sky in a West End production of Mamma Mia!.

A fellow cast member said: 'He was in his element — great voice, great moves, great actor and a great body.

'At the time he had a reputation as a bit of a lothario, but he was always the perfect gentleman. He's always had this supreme self-confidence which you can't help admire.' Another source, whose friend dated Sasse at around this time, described him as 'a complete egomaniac'.

A romance with Italian actress and model Francesca Cini resulted in the birth of a son, Sebastian, in the spring of 2013. However there is no evidence that the pair were married, and free-spirited Sasse seems to have exited the romance early on.

He said: 'I've had so many conversations with [the baby's] mother about how we're going to raise him, and really the only thing I care about is his happiness.'

This was his last public comment about the child.

In 2015 he was cast in the fairy tale-themed musical comedy Galavant, which won him fans in America where it was screened. Kylie, who was cast in a cameo role, met him in July 2015 and there was instant chemistry.

Kylie Minogue at a party during the 60th International Cannes Film Festival in 2007

Serial monogamist Kylie had been single for some time after exiting a five-year romance with Spanish model Andres Velencoso in September 2013.

She and Sasse were first pictured strolling arm-in-arm in July 2015, and were an item by September that year. While preparing for Christmas — when Sasse met her family — she astonished her fans by declaring herself 'completely in love.'

Kylie is generally extremely guarded in interviews, but where Joshua was concerned there was no holding back. She swore that the age gap between them was 'absolutely not an issue', adding: 'In some ways he seems older than me, and in other ways we just feel very balanced.

We haven't actually known each other for very long, but I think that both of us feel as though we have. We just completely fit together. He gets me, I get him. We like being together.'

She went on: 'I hate 'toy boy'. It just sounds awful, degrading and a bit old-fashioned, to be honest. It doesn't make any sense to me. Everyone who's met him so far just says he's not that age, he just isn't. It doesn't affect us. It just doesn't come into play.'

Joshua claimed ignorance of Kylie and her music — surely a sign that he was struggling with the idea of being put in her diminutive shadow.

He claimed: 'I only knew Can't Get You Out Of My Head. That was the only thing I'd heard because pop music is not my demographic.'

He went on to say that there was a 'struggle' involved with carrying the baggage of being Kylie's consort.

'You don't choose who you fall in love with. It comes with a very specific struggle, and that is the baggage she has, and I have it in equal parts. So you just have to focus on the good things. And luckily I am not the kind of guy who reads the gossip magazines, so I don't have to hear about it anyway.' However, in an interview in August, as he prepared to move to Canada to film No Tomorrow, he seemed to make up for this churlishness. He said: 'I know I'm in love when I don't want to be anywhere else but with her.

'As anyone who has met her will attest, she is just the most unbelievable bundle of joy. It's magic, it's excitement and joy and sex.

'It's feeling like you are alive with someone else, and for me, it's someone else who really makes me feel like I am alive every day.' In a Desert Island Discs interview in December 2015 Kylie even spoke about the possibility of having children.

'Who knows if a family is on any one of my horizons? If that were to happen, it would be incredible,' she said.

She reportedly had some eggs frozen before having chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2005.

She added in an interview later: 'I guess you have those visions of, God, what would my child look like, be it a boy or a girl? What would I see of myself in them?

'That's saddening, but I've thought about it for a long time and I've had to face that for a long time.'

In truth, as those words suggest, Kylie is far more robust than her image as a diminutive sparkly diva would have you believe.

Having survived the colossal fame which came with her role in Neighbours (and which pretty much destroyed fellow cast member Jason Donovan for a decade), she has gone on to produce 13 studio albums and 70 million sales over a 30-year career in the music business.

On Tuesday this week she announced that she had signed to the label BMG and is planning a 'pure pop' album later this year.

She has been the object of pity for her unlucky-in-love private life, but again she is annoyed by suggestions that she is some sort of Bridget Jones figure.

She dumped her Neighbours co-star Donovan to dally with tragic INXS rocker Michael Hutchence.

After that romance ended she dated male model James Gooding for three years, followed by a four-year period with French actor Olivier Martinez and then Spanish male model Andres Velencoso.

She said: 'I've been lucky to know a lot of amazing men. I've had a lot of wonderful times and I also love my freedom.'

How bittersweet for Kylie that she will now have more of that than ever.