Craig Revel Horwood: 'I'll do Strictly into my 80s - unless I'm cancelled first'

He’s the acid-tongued judge celebrities dread after suffering an awkward tumble on the dance floor. Poised to give his damning verdict, flattens any semblance of a smile as he delivers a killer blow, pausing as the boos wash over him.

And it’s clear that Craig absolutely adores the pseudo-nasty, panto villain role he’s held onto for the past two decades. It’s the role he was born to play.

“No, I haven’t changed - I have softened up a bit but I suppose the dancing has gotten a lot better,” he tells the , before bluntly adding: “When we first started 20 years ago, of course the dancing wasn’t particularly good at all.”

Craig was just 39 years old when he first landed a seat at the judging panel next to the late Len Goodman, Arlene Phillips and . He’s the only one out of the four still sitting there now and he won’t be leaving anytime soon - as long as he isn’t cancelled.

“I have no intention of quitting because it’s a fantastic Saturday job that I intend to do into my 80s, as long as I’m still compos mentis, darling!” Craig tells us. “And if I haven’t been cancelled before then! But what would I do if I weren’t doing it? Remain a director - I love directing musicals, I would love to direct TV and film. I have choreographed movies like Paddington 2, for instance, which I really loved.I’m not just going to retire and just weed the garden.”

On the cusp of his 60th birthday, Craig is reflecting on his passion for music and dance by releasing a new album of songs that are personal to him and weave a story of his hard-fought path to success and Strictly stardom and fame.

“They’re all personal to me,” he says. “The first show that my mum took me to when I was eight in Sydney and it left an indelible impression on me of musical theatre. I thought it was amazing and I didn’t know what musical theatre was at the time. We went to see Jesus Christ Superstar, which was pretty full-on rock and heavy lead guitar and all of that stuff, it was modern back then in 1973 and it was live on stage.”

Born in the small Australian town of Ballarat, Craig moved to Melbourne to begin his dance career and became a cable pusher and trainee cameraman at Channel 6 - a local TV station. It was during this time he saw Marcia Hines - the first black woman to play Mary Magdalene - who he had watched all those years earlier on stage. “I remember meeting her, my mum ironed her outfit once for a show,” he recalls. “For me, she was a huge, huge star - and then I just had to be in the industry in any shape or form in 1974.”

He left for Paris at 23 years old, joining the Lido Du Paris as a dancer in show Panache, going on to secure a role as a principle singer in Formidable at the Moulin Rouge. A year later, he moved to the UK to join the tour of Cats.

Yet it was tough cracking his big break. “I auditioned about 20 times for Les Mis and got down to the last two for one of the parts and never got it - they gave me Miss Saigon instead,” he says. He reckons the industry has become tougher in recent years.

“I think it’s got a lot more difficult because there’s a lot more people wanting to do it and there’s a lot more theatre schools out there,” he explains. ”And with the advent of things like The and Britain’s Got Talent, all of those shows, people think that they can become an overnight success really quickly from going on a TV programme. But there’s downfalls to that as well - overnight stardom is not an easy thing. I’ve worked up the ranks like most people do - start out singing and dancing and acting, training and then you hope after three years of training you might get an audition and you might get successful. But there are downfalls as well - you’re not going to get every single job. As soon as you walk through the door, you’re being judged for how tall you are and whether you’re going to suit that part or that ensemble.

“You never really know when you’re up for a job what you’re going to get, you never really know what is going to happen. But you have to be able to collect yourself. If you do fall from grace, you need to be able to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get on with it. My advice to people now is don’t expect everything from the industry - you have to create it and you have to be in the right place at the right time.”

Craig has been very open about his own struggles in the industry at a young age. He suffered with an eating disorder for more than 25 years as he grappled with the pressure of staying slim for auditions and shows. “It can lead to destruction if you’re not looked after,” he says. “I mean, if you look at it in the case with Tina Turner, Whitney Houston and Julie Garland! We can go back in time where the pressure was so much and so great with the fame.”

Alongside his numerous career achievements - from his Olivier nominations and penning three autobiographies to dancing with - he’s also found love with horticulturist Jonathan Myring, who is 22 years his junior. Jonathan proposed in 2020 while they sipped on champagne in a salt bath during a trip to a national park.

However, their wedding has been hampered by delays. “After Covid we could not get anything! Now it keeps being put off because of drainage and things with the house. It sounds ridiculous but we want to get married in the garden. Councils, highways - I don’t know why it takes so long in this country to get anything done. That’s one thing that’s going to happen in the next 10 years and that’s now pencilled in for the 20th August 2027. Which isn’t that long if you think about it because I’m working all of next year.

“We’re going to have two weddings - one at the house and the other with family at a lovely church on Rutland Water, which we want to use.It will be fabulous and I can’t wait.”

His packed schedule this year - which also includes a 53-date UK tour - means that he won’t even be able to celebrate his milestone birthday in January. “I can’t even celebrate my 60th so I’m going to have a birthday party in July instead of January because I’m in panto doing two shows a day,” he says. “I won’t get the day off at all so I don’t want to celebrate that because I won’t have the time to do that.”

Craig organises his life three years in advance, so he’s hoping he’ll have the time to complete everything he wants to over the next 10 years. “I’d like to visit Japan, because I’ve never been, and I want to go when the blossoms are out,” he says. “There’s a lot! I’ve never been to India! I need to go to these places. People say you can go when you retire but I don’t intend to retire. I intend on hanging up my drag heels, because they’ll ruin my feet - actually, maybe I'll just going to lower the heel every year.”

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Craig’s album ‘Revelations: Songs Boys Don’t Sing’ and ‘This Is My Life’ are available to pre-order/stream now from