Danny Dyer - Straight Up: My Autobiography

Growing up in the eighties in East London was no picnic. Proper hard bastards, wannabe villains and cockney wide boys everywhere you went, all looking to make their mark. With trouble at home and more at school, Danny Dyer didnt have many options. He was a rascal, running with a tough crowd, getting himself into scrapes with the Old Bill, on the verge of becoming just another nobody.

Until he started to act.

It came naturally to him. He landed role after role, working with big stars, making a name for himself. And then came Human Traffic, and his career went into overdrive. Fame opened doors into the best clubs, the best booze and even better drugs. But with the highs came the lows, and as the drinks flowed, the work dried up. Shut out of an industry that didnt understand him, that heard his reputation before bothering with his talent, he had no choice but to turn it around and sort himself out.

This is the real story straight up.

Funny, honest, full of swagger, and jammed full of antics and anecdotes, this memoir tears it up proper and delivers on every page.

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This book is dedicated to the three most beautiful girls in the world Joanne, Dani and Sunnie. Thanks for putting up with me.

Danny Dyer was born in 1977 in Canning Town, East London, and is a well-known film and television actor. A lifelong player and fan of football, he is an ardent supporter of West Ham United FC. He currently lives with his partner and two young daughters in Essex.

One of the most miserable times of my life was in the summer of 2000. I was just twenty-three years old and Id moved into Noel Gallaghers old gaff Supernova Heights with a girlfriend who was worth millions and who was killing me with her non-stop party lifestyle.

Shed bought the place and had it redecorated in an amazing style a floor-to-ceiling fish tank separated two rooms, an incredible kitchen stocked with all the beer you could drink, and a chill-out area in the basement with a massive TV and fuck-off sound system.

In the evenings Id jump into her brand-new Range Rover and drive to a play I was in at the National Theatre the top playhouse in the country. It was a role other actors would have cut their bollocks off to get and Id been put into it at the personal insistence of the bloke who wrote it Harold Pinter, the greatest playwright of the age. I was getting rave reviews for my performance and pats on the back from everyone who came to see it.

When the play was over, Id sink a drink in the bar with the theatregoers and then do one out of there. Theyre not my sort of people, to be honest, nothing wrong with them but I just havent got anything to talk to them about.

And why would I want to wait around? Back at Supernova Heights there would be a party going on twenty or thirty people. Im not going to go into exactly what went on there lots of very, very famous people but it was like the last days of Rome with added Charlie.

Id get a hooter full of class As, a skin full of beer, talk bollocks all night and then take a couple of sleeping pills and crash out in bed at about ten in the morning. Then Id wake up in the afternoon in time for the evening performance and start the whole thing again.

So why was I miserable? Because I didnt want to be there. Ive always taken drugs and I probably always will, but theres a difference between having the odd crafty bump up the snout as a reward for a job well done and letting it rule your life. I wasnt respecting that difference and I hadnt been for the month before when I was in Ibiza shooting a film called Is Harry On The Boat?

At that stage of my life Ibiza was the wrong place for a geezer like me. I went fucking mad with drugs and drink and all-night partying, fucked up my relationship with the producers of the film and fucked up my body. If you look at the film now I seem quite fresh-faced but I was so run down I got an ulcer on my eye. The hospital had never seen anything like it. The director of the film had to shoot me from one side to stop it showing on-screen. It makes me heave nowadays to think how I was treating myself and, worse, how I was disrespecting the people who were paying my wages.

But none of that would really have mattered or it would have been fixable if I hadnt fucked up my relationship with Joanne, my childhood sweetheart who Id been with since I was fourteen, the only girl Id ever loved and the mother of my daughter. In Ibiza I betrayed her with the rich bird I wont say her name out of respect to Joanne and Joanne found out through the papers. She went out one morning, bought the Sun and saw pictures of me with this girl splashed all over it.

I phoned her up and she gave me a straight red. Joannes an aggressive little fucker, five foot tall and a right trap on her, a very strong woman. She told me I wasnt seeing my three-year-old again, my beautiful Dani, changed her phone number and cut me out of her life. It shattered me, knocked my feet out from under me. My own dad had left when I was nine years old and I vowed Id never make my kid grow up in a single parent family. Now I had.

I had nowhere to go but Supernova Heights. I was homeless. Now I know going to Noels old pad accompanied by a bird with a blank chequebook beats stopping at the fucking Salvation Army so I dont expect much sympathy. But Id lost contact with everything with Joanne and Dani, with the mates I grew up with, and even with my love of acting.