Paul was born Newton Edward Daniels on April 6, 1938 in Middlesbrough. His father, Handel Newton Daniels was the manager of the Hippodrome cinema in South Bank, Cleveland, North Yorkshire; his mother, Nancy Lloyd, sold the tickets at the box office.

Paul's first interest in magic came during a trip to Paris with his family. He was only eleven when he came across a book called How to Have Fun at Parties, which included a section on how to confuse your friends with card tricks. From that point on, he was enamored with magic, training whenever he could. He was fourteen when he performed his first show for the local Methodist youth club.

Paul left school at sixteen to pursue accountancy, working as a junior clerk for the Eston Town Council offices; At eighteen he began a two-year period as an infantryman in England's first battalion, The Green Howards, carrying out much of his military service in Hong Kong. There he continued to make magic, including performing shows for the crews of visiting American aircraft carriers.

Upon his return to civilian life in 1958, Paul decided to help his parents in a mobile grocery business, and eventually opened his own grocery store. In the evenings, he goes to clubs to perform magic with a comical and brash attitude. Workingmen's clubs across the country were a notoriously rough and noisy environment; and if they paid even the slightest attention to an artist's numbers, it was to cause heckling. Going from club to club, Paul learns to draw customers' attention to his magic and to respond with humor, line for line, to hecklers.

In 1960, he married Jacqueline Skipworth; their union lasted nearly eleven years and produced three sons. Jackie takes care of the family while Paul runs the grocery store and spends more and more time playing in clubs. The marriage ends when Paul decides to give up the grocery store to become a full-time magician.

The Paul Daniels Magic Show was broadcast for the first time on the BBC on Saturday June 9, 1979. Produced by John Fisher, with technical advice from Ali Bongo, this weekly show made Paul a real star. Until the last episode, on June 18, 1994, the show broadcast more than 150 hours of magical and varied entertainment in fifteen years. Although there were guest artists every week, the driving force behind the show was undoubtedly the big star, Paul Daniels. Aside from weekly television, Paul also performed in his own show, It's Magic, at the Prince of Wales Theater from December 10, 1980 to February 6, 1982. It was the longest-running magic show in London.

The name Paul Daniels is reminiscent of that of his wife Debbie McGee. Their first meeting took place on May 23, 1979. A dancer trained at the Royal Ballet school, Debbie was a soloist with the Iranian National Ballet in Tehran, when she was forced to leave the country when the Iranian revolution broke out. Looking for work in England, she auditioned for the role of assistant on Paul's show. Despite an age difference of twenty years, the magician and his assistant fell in love and married in 1988.

Paul Daniels has received many prestigious awards throughout his career, including Magician of the Year in 1983 from the Academy of Magical Arts. He is also the only magician to have been awarded the three highest awards by the Magic Circle of London, including the Maskelyne Award for outstanding contribution to British magic. He and Debbie McGee achieved legendary status as performers of the highest caliber and helped make magic the wonderful entertainment it has become.

In January 2016, Paul and Debbie embarked on a 41 city tour of the UK with their Intimate Magic Show. The tour was interrupted in February, however, when Paul fell at home and had to be taken to hospital. What doctors first thought was a stroke turned out to be an inoperable brain tumor. After a few days in the hospital – where Paul goes from room to room, joking with the other patients – Debbie takes Paul out of the hospital so he can spend his remaining days at home.

Debbie made sure that Paul's final days were pleasant for him; just hours before falling into his final sleep, he was joking, singing Beatles songs and eating ice cream. She explained that because of the location of the tumor and where it was pressing on his brain, Paul knew who was with him and what they were doing, but was not processing any new information. He didn't know he was dying. In mid-March, he simply fell asleep and died approximately 48 hours later on March 17, 2016, at the age of 77.