Darren Day’s Remarkable Transformation: New Fiancée, New Life

The scene was harrowing: barricaded in his bathroom at the tail end of a week-long cocaine binge, former West End star Darren Day was in a state. The question is how did he get there?

It was 2020, the height of the Covid pandemic, and the veteran stage performer and TV host had torn through between ‘20 to 30 grams’ of the class-A substance in a futile attempt to erase his sorrows after his entertainment company went bust.

The now 57-year-old – who had starred on I’m A Celebrity two decades earlier and hosted the popular game show You Bet! – recalled how he had ‘sobbed like I’ve never sobbed before’ as he refused to eat, sleep or change his clothes for a week while hiding in an en-suite bathroom from his fiancée, actress Sophie Ladds.

His life, he later revealed, was in tatters and there seemed no way forward.

But six years on, and the once golden boy of the entertainment industry has come ‘full circle’.

Insiders tell me that Darren is ‘back where it all began for him’ on the stage performing in a new production of Million Dollar Quartet in Cirencester, and attempting to rebuild his life that, for so long, friends had feared was ‘hurtling to a devastating conclusion’.

For, indeed, there was a time when Darren Day couldn’t stay out of the headlines.

Whether it was another whirlwind engagement (he has had six), a further drink-driving conviction or endless confessions about a dogged addiction, the entertainer spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s living a life that seemed more dramatic than any West End musical he was starring in.

But these days, he's making waves in his new role as record producer Sam Phillips in eight shows a week in the Gloucestershire theatre.

As audiences file in to watch the former ‘love rat’ back on stage in a musical retelling of the night Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins made history in their Memphis recording studio, Darren’s career is back where it started.

‘There’s something rather fitting about Darren ending up back in musical theatre,’ one source tells me. ‘After everything that’s happened over the years, he’s gone back to the thing he always did best.’

It is an unlikely second act for someone whose career became almost as synonymous with chaos as it once was with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

After taking over from his friend, the now-disgraced ITV presenter Phillip Schofield, in the lead role of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical in 1993, the Essex-born performer became one of the biggest names in British musical theatre almost overnight.

Blessed with matinee-idol looks, a powerful voice and an easy television charm, he was soon as recognisable on the celebrity circuit as he was on stage.

‘He was really fantastic on the stage,’ a source tells me. ‘When I went to see him back in the day I thought he was brilliant. For a period, he really was one of the biggest names in musical theatre, he had the industry at his feet.’

Indeed, Darren’s career expanded beyond the West End into presenting shows such as You Bet! and appearances on reality programmes such as I’m A Celebrity in 2002 and Celebrity Big Brother in 2016.

But backstage, Darren was fighting a devastating uphill battle.

Developing a crack addiction between 2001 and 2005, the actor described it as ‘ridiculously intense’ and some of his ‘darkest days’.

In 2023, he admitted to going ‘cold turkey’ from alcohol and drugs in the I’m A Celebrity jungle in 2002.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Darren said: ‘I’ve never said this publicly before – but I went cold turkey [on I’m A Celebrity].’

Host Richard Madeley then asked: ‘From drink, drugs or both?’ to which Darren replied: ‘Both – cocaine, the demon powder, and the demon drink.

‘I literally went cold turkey in front of the whole country. I was smashed when I got on the plane to Australia.’

Life was equally as messy in the dating department.

In 1994, he began dating Brookside star Anna Friel, now 49, at the height of her television fame. Their three-year relationship culminated in Day, who was nine years older than her, proposing with a £30,000 engagement ring before abruptly calling it off.

‘It was all a bit blurry why Darren broke up with Anna at the drop of a hat,’ a source has told me. ‘But he had a tendency to be flighty in his relationships which did not serve him well in the future.’

After claiming he was too old for the actress, just two weeks later, he embarked on a romance with Coronation Street actress Tracy Shaw, now 52, who he had met while appearing in the musical Summer Holiday while in Manchester.

Reports later emerged that Darren had given Tracy the diamond originally intended for Anna.

That relationship, too, ended amid acrimony before Darren later admitted the pair’s romance had been fuelled by cocaine-fuelled sex binges.

There was another engagement, this time to future Hollywood actress Isla Fisher, who he once described as ‘the first girl I’ve been in love with,’ only for that relationship to collapse under what he later described as the pressures of their hectic careers. She went on to marry Sacha Baron Cohen, from whom she is now divorced.

Brief romances with Joan Collins’ daughter Tara Newley and actress Sophia Thierens followed, cementing Darren’s reputation as one of the industry’s most notorious lotharios.

Eventually, however, it was Hear’Say singer Suzanne Shaw, 13 years his junior, who appeared to offer something more permanent.

The pair famously began seeing one another while both were engaged to others before welcoming their son Corey together in 2005.

Just weeks later, however, everything unravelled.

On Mother’s Day that year, he left Suzanne and their seven-week-old baby, with reports at the time claiming he declared: ‘I don’t do family.’

‘He could be so cruel and cold like that,’ a source tells me. ‘One minute he was promising you the world and the next you didn’t exist.’

Speaking last year, Suzanne, 44, reflected on the painful breakdown, saying Darren had ‘pretty much gone out to get a curry and didn’t come back’, adding that her subsequent battle with postnatal depression had come as ‘no surprise’.

Day continued his messy relationship trajectory and married Stephanie Dooley, who he eventually divorced in 2019, nine years after she took him back when he was caught philandering with his ex, Suzanne.

Beyond his turbulent love life, however, another battle was quietly taking hold.

In 2010, Darren was convicted of his second drink-driving offence in just two years and was banned from driving for five years.

By then, the entertainer who had once seemed the ‘golden boy’ of the theatre world was better known for his personal struggles than his performances.

When, a decade later Covid brought live entertainment to a standstill and theatres went dark, Day revealed how he'd barricaded himself in the bathroom during a cocaine binge following the liquidation of his company.

‘I lost a week of my life. I did about 20 to 30 grams of cocaine. I kept going until it was gone,’ he said. ‘I sat at the top of the stairs and I sobbed like I’ve never sobbed before.’