WHEN Danny Mountain was a 16-year-old Saints academy player, an injury shattered his dreams of becoming a professional footballer. But eight years later he is living a different sort of dream – as a top porn star.

As well as being an adult movie star himself he is married to one of the best known female pornography actresses in America – Eva Angelina – and the couple have just had their first child, Silvi.

Danny Mountain – which, surprisingly, is his real name – played with Southampton FC youth squad from the age of nine.

“I was very loyal to Saints,” says the 24-year-old.

“Other clubs – Chelsea, West Ham and Tottenham – were interested in me over the years and I turned them away. I’m a loyal person and I loved Southampton.”

Many boys dream of being professional footballers, but Danny got closer to his dream than most.

“Alan Ball paid me a few compliments – you can’t get better than that. He and Geoff Hurst were watching us train when I was about 12 and he said to my dad ‘every ten to 15 years in this country we have a talent that sticks out from the rest and I believe your son may be that talent.’ I was over the moon when he said that – I had the biggest head!”

Unfortunately, when he was 16, a tackle left Danny with a badly injured knee. Saints paid for him to have therapy for several months but eventually let him go. He was, he says, heartbroken.

Danny trained as a carpenter but a few years later, when he was 19, his career took another turn.

“I was dating a Page Three girl. Her agent wanted her to get into porn. She wasn’t keen but he gave her the details of an audition in London and I went along. I didn’t know what to expect but I was full of confidence. I wasn’t at all nervous about the sexual part. I was worried about talking on camera – I couldn’t control my face I was so nervous.”

Despite his nerves, Danny’s audition was a success and he began to get regular work appearing in pornographic movies.

But there were still some hurdles to get over – like telling his family.

“When I told my mum she was a bit shocked,” he laughs.

“She had the same mentality as a lot of people – she thought it was going to be sleazy. But we had a serious talk about it and after a few months she didn’t worry at all. She was worried that I was OK because I was only 19 but I was having a great time and flying all round the world and she realised how happy I was. My dad’s a big kid. When I told him he was like ‘go on my son!’.”

Danny started a relationship soon after he began acting in porn films with a girl who didn’t know what he did for a living.

She eventually found out at a friend’s house when someone switched the television to an adult channel and she saw Danny on the screen.

“She didn’t like it and we split up,” says Danny. “We did get back together but she never liked it, she hated me going to work.”

Luckily, there are no such problems with Danny’s wife, Eva Angelina, a very successful porn star, who he met filming on a porn set in April 2007.

“She’d flown from LA, been driven straight to the set, got ready and we did the scene. Straight afterwards she said ‘Jesus, I want to marry you and take you back to LA’, and I just said ‘done’.

“We went to LA for a few months then came back here for a bit and moved to LA permanently in October 2007. We got married in December 2007, and she gave birth to Silvi on December 9, 2008.

“Eva and I had an instant connection. Eva says she fell in love with me at first sight. I’m not a big believer in love at first sight. It took me about three months to fall in love with her. It just seemed right. It’s going really well. My wife and daughter are the two most important people in my world.”

Danny says that although both he and his wife have sex with other people as part of their work, jealousy isn’t an issue.

“The thing with porn is it’s like a big family – I know it sounds weird. I know all the male performers and she knows all the female ones. We’re friends – we just have sex on camera for a living. We get tested for sexually-transmitted diseases every three weeks so it’s very clean.

“I’ve always been able to cut myself off because I’ve got a life outside of porn. I turn up to my shoot, do my work then go home.”

Danny certainly hasn’t got any complaints about the porn industry and loves the life it has given him.

“We have a nice house, we go to restaurants. I play football here for Vinnie Jones’s Hollywood Allstars, with Jason Statham against people like Frank Leboeuf.

“We go to Vinnie’s house for barbecues and meet his celebrity friends.”

It has, he says, also secured a good future for his and Eva’s baby daughter, Silvi.

Danny hopes Silvi will be comfortable with her parents’ career choices and says they will shield her from it to some extent.

“We’ll have to pick the right time to talk to her about it. A film crew wanted to film her birth and they couldn’t understand why we said no!

“Yes, me and my wife make porn films but I want to keep our daughter away from it. “I wouldn’t want Silvi going into porn. My wife says it’s up to her but I wouldn’t be happy with it.

“On the other hand, I’m a bit of a hypocrite because if I had sons and they wanted to get into porn I’d be happy to push them.

“I’m having the time of my life, so why wouldn’t I want my sons to do it?”