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Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
By Gillian Glover, The Scotsman 19 November 2005
It's a shame the new James Bond has been cast, because as soon as Darius Danesh strode into the green room of the Adelphi Theatre, just one phrase came to mind. Matinee idol. He is 6ft 4ins of physical charisma. Fine-featured, with luxuriant hair, eyes dark as Omar Khayam's Bowl of Night - and he is Scottish-born. Even better, Darius seems to have acquired a celluloid hero's gift for indestructibility.
It's four years since the nation guffawed at his wince-making Britney Spears number on Popstars. He was trashed in the tabloid press, jeered at in the street - but he came right back for more. When he told the judges who derided him that their decision would only spur him on to greater things, most viewers hoped he meant market gardening or waiting tables. Instead he signed up for Pop Idol. Now "doing a Darius" has become shorthand for that most crucial showbiz routine: "Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again."
Yet what he is about to begin is very different from the challenges of either reality TV or the recording studio. On Monday Darius debuts as Billy Flynn in the long-running London West End production of Chicago. This is no small challenge. The role was played in the film version by Richard Gere, and the youngest actor cast to date was 37 - 12 years older than Darius.
But is he daunted by the prospect? Of course not. There is not a ripple of anxiety visible in the silk velvet of his suave persona. "It's just another chapter," he smiles, with a zap of dazzling dentistry. "I had been in the studio writing for my third album - this time, music that is more jazz-inspired - when a call came from the American producers of Chicago, asking if I'd like to audition.
"Now, as soon as someone says 'audition' I see a challenge," he says with a chuckle. In my own mind, I see his pony-tailed, goatee bearded 21-year-old self, offering his karaoke catastrophe of Hit Me Baby One More Time. But aversion therapy must be an alien concept to Darius, so audition he did, and was told he'd got the part. "They said: 'Your voice is mature enough, you're tall, your acting's good enough, we think you can pull it off.' "
If this sounds a little self-congratulatory, it's a trait for which Darius has been criticised before. But after an hour in his company, it becomes clear that this isn't simply arrogance, it is absolutely unstinting self-disclosure. If the mix of an Iranian father and Scottish mother have awarded him his good looks, it has also surely contributed to his rather un-British flamboyance. Some restraint gene is missing from the assembly, and so statements which might make other 25-year-old males blush come easily to Darius.
He talks of love, ideals, sex, fear. He uses epic comparisons, frequent superlatives. His speech, like his physique, is larger than life. But in a slightly naive, children's fairy-tale way. His enthusiasm is encompassing, gushing.
"I started my professional life on stage with Scottish Opera," he begins. "This was their production of The Trojans, and I played a Trojan peasant boy. I had grown up with wonderful stories of Persian battles. I was captivated by acting. Really entranced that you could tell a story in someone else's clothes, someone else's shoes. And I love telling stories. Maybe because I grew up hearing stories from my father. His grandfather was ambassador to the Shah of Iran. At the age of four he sang Happy Birthday to the Shah and as a teenager he performed on stage at court and wanted to become an actor - but there were already the stirrings of revolution, so he was told to make another decision. He chose medicine and came to Britain to study in the best schools. So in a way he missed, or lost, an ambition, and I think that in some weird process of osmosis, I absorbed that."
These are Darius's exact words. But they don't quite sound like someone talking naturally. It is more like a script - delivered with no pauses or hesitations. It isn't that he sounds insincere. Quite the contrary, but the smoothness of his speech is rather strange - it's the sort of thing one might expect from a John Gielgud or Alec Guinness after 50 years in the theatre. Darius talks of his father a lot. He is 62 and retired early from his high-profile career as a gastro-intestinal surgeon at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow when he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer 18 months ago.
"My dad faced a terminal illness, and the prospects were very bad. But we dealt with it in a logical and loving way and investigated all the possibilities."
To achieve this, Darius took a year out from his music career, and his younger brother Aria also put his medical studies on hold so they could be with their father during his treatment at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. Only the youngest boy, Cyrus, who was only eight at the time, remained in Glasgow for his schooling.
"My father is a science-based person, but he is still very, very open to alternative therapy because he believes in the power of the mind."
Although Booth Danesh was given just months to live, he is now in remission, and has astonished both his doctors and himself with his recovery.
"He is writing a book - a doctor's perspective on his illness and how he fought it. My dad embraced conventional medicine. He had chemotherapy and radiotherapy because the cancer was too advanced for surgery. But he also sought out and tried every possibility with regard to alternative therapies.
"As did I. I went and met an American lady [Brandon Bays] who wrote a book called The Journey. She had a tumour in her stomach the size of a football, and used a form of meditation to fight the cancer, based on the simple fact that cells replicate. She convinced her body to go back to the cell memory and produce cells in a food way and not in a cancerous way. At least that's how she describes it, and it worked for her. So my dad used that and reiki and aromatherapy and acupuncture and diet and positive thinking.
And it seems it worked for him too. A year ago he was clinically dead. The chemotherapy had left him so weak his heart stopped beating for a few moments. But he clung on. "First for a day, and then a week, and then months - an amazing gift for our family."
During the early months of his father's illness, Darius had found it impossible to write music. And even when he did, he was not pleased with the results. "But my dad liked to hear me play guitar and sing, so I played him the song I'd written for him Live Twice as he lay in hospital. I also told him I wasn't going to release it. I had decided not to release anything that year. But he thought otherwise.
"He said, 'Darius, life goes on. I fight to live to see the achievements of my children. Every morning I wake up and my first thoughts are about my children, not my own life. I've lived my life. Now I'm living for you.'
"That was very moving, and very inspiring," says Darius softly. So he did release the song, and now that his father's health is stable, he is committing all his energies to his new stage role.
Darius is also advising his father about the book - unsurprisingly, he has already written one himself.
"I had the luck of writing my book Sink or Swim about a foot in the door of the music industry - which was essentially a story for anyone who is interested in getting a start in music today, because things change so fast in this business.
"That's why I love the story of Chicago. It seems to me, it's all come full circle. What makes this a great show is that what it satirises is going on today. The show was written in 1975, and it's set in the 1920s at the birth of jazz and cabaret, but the cult of fame which it makes fun of is not just a distant curiosity. It has become our national obsession.
"My character, Billy Flynn, describes Roxy as drawn like a moth to the flame of fame, and for me that is just so telling; so relevant to what I feel I've experienced myself in the last few years.
"I was introduced to the public in a very commercial way, via Popstars and Pop Idol ..."
I ask him if the stinging insults which greeted his first pop singing efforts did lasting damage, as he has spoken in the past about drowning his anxieties and fears of failure with alcohol. Was it difficult to recover the self-confidence for which he was so lampooned? A self-confidence which, at the time, he was only acting anyway.
Darius's reply is so diplomatic, his ambassador ancestors could only listen with pride.
"I hope I will always try to absorb constructive criticism," he says. "Criticism can be very important in becoming self-aware, and being able to improve and move closer to whatever your dream and goal may be. I've always tried to take criticism on the chin, and respect it. I've fallen on my face often enough to realise that listening to other people can be useful and instructive."
Useful and instructive? Golly. This is frighteningly mature and very different from the headstrong student singer who ignored his parent's pleas to become a lawyer, then failed to finish his English degree at Edinburgh University, and refused a record deal from Simon Cowell on the back of Pop Idol because he predicted he would lose creative control of his work.
But nor is it quite a contradiction. Darius is at his most vehement when insisting that no-one should limit their ambitions.
"You hear people say: 'You've only got one chance.' But that's absolutely not true. It's utter rubbish. The fact is, life is what you make it. There are opportunities everywhere. The really important part is recognising them."
Just as he is doing with Chicago. And what could be another opportunity for disaster, as schoolboy stints with Scottish Opera are not normally considered sufficient training for West End musicals. But he has learned to harness his nerves, and use the terrified excitement to ensure he gives his very best performance. Whether the critics will deem that sufficient is, he says "irrelevant".
"You can't help how other people perceive you. I am absolutely confident in my friends and family: my close loved ones. There's nothing I can't cope with if I have their support."
This charmed circle includes American actress Natasha Henstridge, of whom he says: "I'm in love. And in love with a woman who has shown me that you can be as beautiful in your heart as in your appearance. With Natasha, beauty really is more than skin deep. I've been lucky enough to date some wonderful girls, but until Natasha, I've always shied away from dating actresses or other singers.
"But now we're both celebrating, though on different sides of the Atlantic. She's starring in a new TV show about the first woman US president, called Commander in Chief and I'm in Chicago. So we're separated. But you can't choose who you fall in love with. Besides, she'll be here for my first night."
As will his mum Avril, who still works as a GP in Bearsden, his two brothers and, one might guess, more than a few of the female fans who so often launch their undergarments onto the stage when he's singing.
So it's all coming up roses for Darius, it seems. And who could grudge him the spotlight? He's meticulously polite and charming, a devoted son. And his success came in our very favourite wrapping. It was hard, slippery and repeatedly interleaved with banana skins.
• Darius Danesh plays Billy Flynn in Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre, London, from Monday 21 November to 14 January 2006. Tel: 0870 403 0303 for details.