Biography
Though Anton du Beke first stepped into a recording studio well after establishing himself elsewhere, his earliest and most enduring renown came from the dance floor rather than the concert stage, most visibly as a longtime presence on the BBC’s hit series Strictly Come Dancing. Anthony Paul Beke entered the world on 20 July 1966, the son of a Hungarian father and a Spanish mother, and grew up amid the greenery of Sevenoaks in Kent. He took his first dance lessons at ten, shifted his focus to ballroom technique at fourteen, and departed school at sixteen to pursue an amateur competitive career while still a teenager. Balancing evening and weekend practice with daytime employment at a furniture retailer, he gradually earned recognition across the amateur circuit. In 1997 he formed a partnership with Erin Boag that quickly yielded multiple competition victories; the pair turned professional in 2002. Their triumph at the 2003 International Dance Teachers’ Association Classic brought them to the notice of BBC producers then assembling the cast for a new ballroom contest, Strictly Come Dancing. Once engaged for the programme, du Beke and Boag became central fixtures as the series achieved massive viewership and was subsequently licensed to more than forty territories, where it generally aired under the title Dancing with the Stars. The debut season reached screens in 2004; thirteen years afterward the show remained in production, with du Beke appearing in nearly every instalment. He and Boag rose to national prominence and mounted regular live tours. Additional broadcasting work followed, including presenting duties on the cookery programme Step Up to the Plate and the game show Hole in the Wall. At fifty-one, in 2017, he issued his first album, From the Top, a collection that juxtaposed timeless swing standards with contemporary material freshly arranged in a swing idiom.
Albums
