Duncan Llywelyn Campbell

Born: 30 March 1993

Died: 14 August 2024

Actor and Poet

Dunk died at home surrounded by his family in Lower Largo following extensive treatment for diffuse hemispheric glioma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer that affects children and young adults.

Dunk was the third child in his family. He made it clear he wished no further siblings so he could be always the youngest. He was a charming smiling friendly child who enjoyed rugby and playing games with his brothers. He fully embraced childhood without much desire to leave it until he found that you can live as an actor and continue to play with friends taking multiple training opportunities to master the craft. There is now a scholarship fund in his name.

During his early adult years including university which he described as feeling “like standing on a landmine, and I’m not doing that again,” he began recording his feelings as poems which he hid for a while before “coming out, as a poet,” to his brother Danny while drunk at New Year. 

Some poems showed the distress he suffered struggling to find a route to happiness when conventional routes like university and 9-5 work were so uncomfortable for him. Acting was his path to happiness and transformative for his mood and energy. 

Having found his path, life was social, busy and so good for a couple of years he declared it the “best time of his life” in calls to his mother which were less frequent now he was having so much fun. Covid arrived and he returned to the parental home in Lower Largo as did his brothers and nephews whom he adored playing with.

As he returned to work , he was diagnosed with brain cancer in February 2021. Treatment was aggressive and came with disability due to disease and also necessary treatment by surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. He fought back from right side paralysis to walk and even run in a fashion. He had lost half his sight and almost all short term memory. Life was interrupted by severe stroke-like seizures each of which might represent terminal events but each time he fought back significantly outliving his prognosis. 

Feeling some debt to his dark days his book, ‘The Suicide Notes’, is a life story interspersed by poems from those moments, and now used by the Canmore Trust to help in suicide counselling. To complete his debt to those years he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, a 3rd time but on the last occasion as a one man show to explain why young people suicide and don't leave explanations. 

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He would start with something like ‘this is about suicide and brain cancer but don't worry there are also some jokes’. The show was a sell out each night with lots of laughter and later kind words from often bereaved parents who now had a better understanding why young people throw what looks like a good life away. 

During the show, he explained that he had suffered from the belief that he was  so inferior to those around him that the best way to love them was to amputate himself from their life. It was this delusion, as he explained and his dark poem ‘Mouse Among Giants,’ was from that time. He was glad when he needed to never read it again. Such was Duncan’s charisma and performance capacity that even as he became almost totally blind during the run of shows it did not dampen his performance. 

Dunk was aware he had nearly thrown life away in his early 20s, but he  grew to  love life just as his future was “stolen” from him. He endured conventional treatment but pushed for new standards, shorter time to treatment, the first in the region to have genomic analysis of his biopsy. The first under the care of NHS Lothian to have targeted chemotherapy based on the analysis of his mutations. He had suffered relapse just before his one man show and suffered severe deterioration within a couple of weeks such that as he lay unconscious his family were told to expect death within days.

Yet he recovered again and travelled to New York to participate in a safety trial, first non US patient, of a new technique, MRgFUS, which holds much promise once the correct regime is refined. He achieved significant benefit but later succumbed to recurrence.

Dunk described his ‘happy place’ as “sipping a cocktail on a beach talking to someone I haven't met before”. 

His disease brought him into contact with many in NHS Lothian and further off and he would he would want me to finish by noting not just the excellence of care and facilities, the professionalism of staff but the many acts of fun and kindness, consideration from all he encountered, the NHS traffic attendants, the receptionists, ambulance staff he smiled at, Ward 1 WGH, the radiotherapists and thanks all of them.

He is greatly missed.