Darius Campbell-Danesh, Popstars and Pop Idol reality TV star who carved out a successful career in musicals – obituary

Darius Campbell-Danesh, who has died of unknown causes aged 41, erupted into the public consciousness in 2001 on ITV’s Popstars talent show when, pony-tailed, goatee-bearded and singing falsetto, he hammed his way through Britney Spears’s Hit Me Baby One More Time and was booted off amid general derision in the final round; yet he went on to defy the mockers and forge a successful career not only as a pop star, but in musical theatre.

Following his Popstars debut, Darius, as he generally became known, was subjected to a press drubbing (Julie Burchill referred to the “horror, the amazement, the sheer molten glee that is Darius”). Yet later the same year he appeared on Channel 4’s To Die For, featuring the most embarrassing musical moments on television (including his own), in which he was filmed in the bath of a Mayfair hotel with a Playboy model and a dwarf wearing a snorkel.

Displaying a supersized appetite for humiliation, Darius then pluckily returned to the fray as a contestant on Pop Idol. Having shaved off the goatee and ponytail, he made it to the final three, before being beaten by Will Young and Gareth Gates.

Simon Cowell, who judged his efforts, acknowledged Darius’s courage, but felt that he did not have what it takes: “Top bloke,” he told The Daily Telegraph, “I have the highest regard for the guy for putting himself through that. But if I thought he could have been a star he’d have been signed up a long time ago.”

In fact Cowell offered him a record contract to make an album of Sinatra covers, but Darius turned it down, instead being signed by Steve Lillywhite, the producer of U2, to Mercury records. In July 2002 he shot to No 1 in the charts with his first single, Colourblind, inspired, according to the press notes, by his “love of classic guitar-driven melody, tempered by his uncanny grasp of that magic ingredient that makes people sing along”. His debut album, Dive In, meanwhile, went platinum.

The promotional video for Colourblind featured the 6ft 2in, dark-haired and smoothly good-looking singer, being thrown out of a car in the middle of a desert with his guitar, then discarding his black suit and donning a pair of jeans. It seemed to indicate his determination to put his uncool TV talent show past behind him.

Darius subsequently had four more top 10 singles, and when his pop career began to fade, he carved out a successful career on the stage and even appeared in opera.

In 2010, after winning the ITV talent show Popstar to Operastar (coached by Rolando Villazón) he made his operatic debut at the O2 Arena with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the leading (baritone) role of Escamillo the toreador in a Saturday matinée performance of Carmen.

The Daily Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen applauded his pluck, though he found himself unable to judge the venture a success.

Darius was sometimes labelled arrogant and egotistical, but interviewers discovered a very different side. Emily Bearn, who interviewed him for The Sunday Telegraph in 2002, found him “extremely affable”, adding: “Far from being the brash egotist he appeared on television talent shows, there is something immensely endearing about Darius. Perhaps it’s his earnestness. Perhaps it’s his baby face. Or perhaps it’s just his rose-tinted spectacles, which at times appear to blind him.”

After the announcement of his death, a friend, the broadcaster James O’Brien, tweeted: “Darius was a lovely bloke... He came across as very confident and ambitious on TV but away from the cameras he was gentle, generous, humble & utterly devoted to his little brothers.”

The eldest of three boys, all named after Persian kings, Darius was born in Glasgow on August 19 1980 to a Scottish mother, Avril Campbell, a GP, and an Iranian consultant gastroenterologist father, Booth Danesh, the grandson of one of the Shah of Iran’s ambassadors. He would describe himself later as “a Christian enlightened by the teachings of Islam”.

Brought up in the affluent Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, Darius showed musical talent as a boy, starring, aged four, as Peter Pan at his kindergarten: “I saw my parents laugh and I realised that making people happy is just the most amazing thing to be able to do.”

He attended the Glasgow Academy where, according to the 1998 year book, he was voted by his peers as the boy most likely to become famous either for “being a giant plonker or a gay porn star” – or possibly prime minister.

He was halfway through a degree in English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University when he was selected to appear on Popstars.

By 2004, when he released his second album, Live Twice – less successful than the first – it seemed that Darius’s time in the pop spotlight might have peaked. But he reinvented himself and won acclaim as a performer in stage musicals, making a dramatic comeback when he landed the role of scheming lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago for two West End runs in 2005 and 2006 (he claimed he based his portrayal on Simon Cowell), then played Sky Masterson in Michael Grandage’s Olivier award-winning production of Guys And Dolls in 2007.

The following year he was cast as Rhett Butler in the world premiere of the stage musical of Gone with the Wind, directed by Trevor Nunn, the Telegraph review praising his “masterly combination of dash and pathos”.

On the small screen Darius made a guest appearance as himself in an episode of the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks, performing Girl in the Moon at a graduation ball. In 2009 he guest-starred on the BBC series Hotel Babylon as an Italian magazine editor.

By this time he had moved to the US, where he found some success as a film producer. He was listed as a co-producer on Imperium (2016), starring Daniel Radcliffe as an FBI agent who goes undercover in a neo-Nazi group.

Darius, who published a memoir, Sink or Swim, in 2003, often returned to the UK, starring in 2010 in The History of the Big Bands tour – a show about the Big Band and Swing Era, and appearing in several more West End productions. In 2013-14 he was First Sergeant Milt Warden in From Here to Eternity, a musical based on James Jones’s novel, and in 2015-16 played the gambler Nick Arnstein opposite Sheridan Smith’s Fanny Brice in the West End revival of Funny Girl.

He did much work for charity as an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, and worked for and supported several cancer charities, his parents having both suffered but recovered from the disease. He also designed a guitar for Guitar Aid.

Darius himself had suffered from health issues. In 2010, he told Hello! magazine about a car crash earlier that year during a “lads’ driving holiday” in which he had broken his neck and come within a few millimetres of death.

In 2015 he drank water from the River Thames to demonstrate a bottle filter, launched by Fresh2o, a water aid charity he supported, not realising that his bottle did not have a filter fitted. As a result he developed bacterial meningitis and cerebral oedema and was put in a coma. He recovered but was bed-bound for three months.

Darius married, in 2011, Natasha Henstridge, a Canadian actress, but the marriage was dissolved in 2018.

On August 11 Darius was found dead in a US apartment block across the street from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. No cause of death has yet been established. Friends are quoted as saying that before he died he had been looking forward to a forthcoming Pop Idol reunion - and UK comeback tour.

Darius Campbell-Danesh, born August 19 1980, died August 11 2022