Anton Du Beke, the Strictly dancer who never won and ended up on the judging panel

Anton Du Beke

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	July 20, 1966 Kent, England
Occupation	Ballroom dancer and television presenter

The most telling number in Anton Du Beke’s dancing career is zero. In seventeen series as a professional on Strictly Come Dancing he never lifted the glitterball trophy,. The show developed a habit of handing him the celebrities least likely to survive a quickstep, and he made something out of the assignment: a courtly, self-mocking ballroom man who could steer a partner with two left feet across the floor and still get the studio laughing with him. The question his career asks now is whether that persona was a consolation prize or the point all along. The seat he holds today, on the judging panel, rewards exactly the charm he spent those years perfecting.

He was born Anthony Paul Beke in Kent, to a Hungarian father and a Spanish mother, and grew up in Sevenoaks. He found the Holton School of Dancing there at fourteen, left school at sixteen to chase an amateur career and, a year later, committed himself to ballroom, paying for it with day jobs that included selling beds.

The home he left behind stayed private for decades. In 2023, on ITV’s Kate Garraway’s Life Stories, he described how his father’s drinking turned the family home violent, ending in a Boxing Day attack in which his father stabbed him in the stomach and the leg. He spent three days in hospital. His father was cleared in court. After his parents divorced the two had no contact, and when his father died in 2001 he did not go to the funeral.

The professional story begins with a partner. He met the New Zealand-born dancer Erin Boag in 1997, and the couple won both the closed and the open categories of the New Zealand Championships in 1998 and again in 1999. They turned professional in 2002 and reached the British National final that year and the next two. When the BBC‘s new celebrity ballroom programme scouted them in 2004 they were ranked 14th in the world, and they signed on expecting a single series. They kept competing through the show’s first two runs, then retired from the circuit once it was clear they could not prepare for championships and train celebrities at the same time.

Strictly Come Dancing made him famous on terms he did not choose. He finished third in the first series with the soprano Lesley Garrett, and after that the draw rarely favoured him. In 2010 he partnered Ann Widdecombe, a Conservative politician with little dancing ability, and the public vote carried them to the quarter-final, a run that showed how much of the show’s appeal lay outside the steps. Jerry Hall and Nancy Dell’Olio came in other years, and with the fashion journalist Susannah Constantine he finished last for the first time. His first final arrived only in the thirteenth series, with the newsreader Katie Derham. His first perfect tens came in the seventeenth, at Blackpool, for an American Smooth with the actress Emma Barton, and the pair finished joint runners-up in 2019. It was as close as he got.

The work around the show filled out the profile of a variety entertainer. He was a team captain on the BBC One game show Hole in the Wall and took over as host in 2009, replacing Dale Winton. In 2017 Polydor released his debut album, From the Top, which reached number 21 on the UK chart. A year later came his first novel, One Enchanted Evening, the opening of a series set around the ballroom of the fictional Buckingham Hotel that ran to eight books; his publisher says his novels have sold more than 500,000 copies. With his fellow professional Giovanni Pernice he made two travel series for the BBC, in Sicily and then in Spain.

The promotion came in 2021. He had already filled in on the panel for two weeks of the 2020 series while Motsi Mabuse quarantined, and that June the BBC named him the permanent replacement for Bruno Tonioli, who had been kept in the United States by pandemic travel restrictions and his role on Dancing with the Stars. The professional who had spent seventeen series being scored now sits beside Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse and Shirley Ballas holding the paddle.

The gentleman image has one episode it has never fully absorbed. In 2009, after his partner Laila Rouass arrived at rehearsal with a spray tan, he said she “looked like a paki”. He apologised publicly, telling the BBC’s companion show It Takes Two that he felt “embarrassed” and “stupid”, and the BBC took no action. Rouass accepted the apology, said the story had been blown out of proportion and later backed him to become a judge; in 2024 she defended him again while still calling what he said unacceptable. The episode is the counterweight to the charm: a reminder that the banter the show sold as harmless could cross a line, and that the broadcaster decided quickly that an apology was enough. There is also a quieter case against the underdog legend. The pairings that made him popular kept the dancer who was once 14th in the world mostly off screen, and his best-remembered routines are the comic ones, which hide how good he was.

His sixtieth year, which he reached in July, has been his busiest away from the ballroom. In January he turned up in costume on ITV’s The Masked Singer as the Arctic Fox. In September he returned to the panel for the twenty-fourth series of Strictly Come Dancing, the first without Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, now presented by Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe. A multi-book deal with Bonnier Books UK, announced in October 2025, brings his first memoir, Steps in Time: The Music, Memories and Moments that Made Me, on 5 November 2026, with a theatre tour built around it, and a new fiction series in autumn 2027. On 6 November he also releases Dance My Way To Christmas, a swing single he co-wrote with Jacqui Hicks and sings with Lance Ellington. “Launching a Christmas single is something I’ve always wanted to do, for as long as I can remember,” he said when he announced it.

He married Hannah Summers at Cliveden in 2017, and the couple have twins, a boy and a girl. They live in Buckinghamshire.

From 10 to 22 December he takes Anton at Christmas around UK theatres, singing the new single to audiences who, for once, have bought tickets to watch him rather than his partner.

Tags: Anton Du Beke, Strictly Come Dancing, Bruno Tonioli, Erin Boag, Giovanni Pernice, Hole in the Wall