‘Incredibly’, it’s twenty years since Darius (Danesh) turned up on our TV screens!
And you’d have to own a black and white set to be ‘colourblind’ to that!
Darius (Campbell-Danesh) was born in Glasgow in 1980 and after a very short career as teenage singer and performer in the West End, landed an audition on the 2001 talent show, Popstars. He made it to the final but lost out to the band that would become Hear’Say. Darius singed with producer Steve Lillywhite and the following year he released his debut single, “Colourblind”, which went straight to number one in the UK and spent two weeks there.
The follow up, “Rushes”, made it to the top five before he released his first album, “Dive In”, just before Christmas. The album would gain a Platinum certification in the UK for sales of more than 300,000 copies and produce a third top ten hit with “Incredible (What I Meant To Say)”. Darius went on tour in 2003 as support to Columbian singer Shakira. When he returned to the UK, he played 23 dates across the country in support of his own album, all of them sold out.
Darius went back into the studio at the end of the year to record his second long player, with the lead single, “Kinda Love”, coming out the following October. The song put him back in the UK top ten (No.8) and he registered a five top ten hit at the beginning of 2005 with “Live Twice” (UK No.7). However, the album from which they came from (“Live Twice”) did not perform well and sank without trace as soon as it arrived. 2005 was not all a miss as Darius returned to the stage to take the lead role in Chicago (2005-06) and followed this with Guys And Dolls in 2007 and Gone With The Wind in 2008, all on the London stage.
Darius returned to talent TV in 2010 when he showed up in the new contest, Popstar To Operastar. This time, he went on to win it and from that would star in the opera, Carmen. Musicals were now his forte as he continued into the 2010’s in the West End appearing in From Here To Eternity and Funny Girl. Darius, now just using the surname Campbell, hit the headlines in 2011 when he married actress Natasha Henstridge in a secret ceremony. It was not to last and the couple filed for divorce just two years later!
When he’s not on stage, Darius is an ambassador for The Prince’s Trust and works with The Lymphoma Association and Cancer Research UK, charities he personally chose in the wake of his father’s diagnosis with terminal cancer in 2004, who would in fact survive and make a full recovery. Darius has also recently turned his eye towards film production, making the thriller ‘Imperium’ in 2016 with former Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe. Whether we see Darius back in the studio or releasing music seems a remote and distant call, but who knows what he has in store for us in the future…
NB: Sadly, on 11th August 2022, Darius died suddenly at the age of 41. RIP.
Stay in touch with Darius through his FACEBOOK page
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