Ronan Keating once profoundly sang that life is a rollercoaster, and that's certainly the case for Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood.
The outspoken Australia-born star - who appears on Loose Women today - has crammed more living into his 58 years than most people do in a lifetime.
From an inauspicious start in a sleepy outback town, to becoming a 'rent boy', a West End star and the husband of a Welsh actress, his life has never been short of drama.
Craig - who is now engaged to horticulturalist Jonathan Myring - was raised in the mining town of Ballarat, Australia.
His father Phil was a Royal Australian Navy Lieutenant and an alcoholic.
"My dad can be the nicest, most charming man, but when he drinks that person disappears," Craig once told the Daily Mail of his dad, who died in 2015.
"I am still on speaking terms with him and I still love him, but we all have to accept that he's chosen alcohol."
Determined to get out of his home town, at 17 Craig started exchanging sexual favours with a major Australian TV star in return for cash for dance lessons in Melbourne.
"I have to refer to him as 'Mr X' for legal reasons. Basically I got favours from him for sexual favours, so I likened that to being a rent boy, only because I didn't feel anything for this character," he explained in his 2008 autobiography, All Balls and Glitter: My Life.
At the time, Craig was working as a chef - which he hated - and saw the agreement with the then 43 year old unnamed star as an opportunity.
"He paid for my dance tuition which was brilliant as it got me out of my hometown and to Melbourne where I trained.
"It was just a business deal, but I don't actually know if he saw it that way. I didn't actually ask. I didn't want to know."
Speaking to the Cheltenham Literary Festival, said the whole chapter had changed his life for the better.
"It was like a casting couch so it was the best thing that ever happened to me," he said.
"I suppose that could be compared to a lady getting engaged and getting a great big, sparkling Tiffany ring - and then breaking off the engagement but keeping the ring."
In the wide-ranging book, Craig also told how he funded himself from 18 onwards by performing as a drag queen called Lavish.
He toured the whole of Australia as his alter-ego but decided to 'kill her off' when he moved to the UK in the late 1980s.
Craig also dished on his ill-fated marriage to wife Jane, who knew he identified as bisexual when they tied the knot.
The pair met while sharing a house in London during Craig's stint in the West End show Miss Saigon, and got together at the start of 1990.
In love and desperate to start a family, Craig, then 25, popped the question to Jane, who was five years older.
"I was both gay and straight, so being bisexual, it wasn't a big issue for me or for her. We were two people who loved each other, coming together and wanting to have kids before it was too late," he wrote in his book.
"I loved her zany qualities, her appreciation for the arts, her outgoing nature, her ability to converse with anybody, her strength, her passion – even her Welsh accent."
But when the passion dried up, he claimed Jane cheated with a mutual friend, sparking their divorce.
"I was young and stupid when I got married and I suppose I wanted to see if I could live a normal life, but she started going off with other guys, so it came to an end. I believe in monogamy," he said.
"If I love someone, I will stay with them. But what can you do when your wife strays? Tell her it's okay, and encourage her to go for it? Or do you address that there's some thing going wrong?
"Some people can live that way, but I'm just not one of them. The divorce side of things was hideous, but she's happily married now."
