George Michael

• 1. Introduction

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  George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. He was 53. His partner, Fadi Fawaz, found him in bed in the early hours of that morning. It was a death as quietly private as the man had, in many ways, tried to be. Yet the world grieved loudly. Outside his former home in Highgate, fans built an informal memorial garden that volunteers tended for roughly eighteen months.

  He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on the 25th of June 1963, in East Finchley, Middlesex. He would go on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. The Radio Academy would later calculate that he was the most played artist on British radio across the entire period from 1984 to 2004. He sold between 100 million and 125 million records worldwide.

  But behind those numbers was a life packed with friction. A boy who changed his name to survive fame. A man who kept his deepest self hidden for decades, then was forced into the open by an arrest in a Beverly Hills restroom. A philanthropist who gave away millions without ever attaching his name. A songwriter who fought his own record company in open court rather than be packaged and sold the way he'd once agreed to be.

  How did a Greek Cypriot restaurateur's son from East Finchley become one of the defining voices of the late twentieth century? And what did it cost him?

• 2. Roots and Ridgeley

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  Jack Panayiotou, born Kyriacos, emigrated from Patriki, Cyprus, to England in the 1950s and built a life as a restaurateur. His wife, Lesley, born Harrison in 1937, was an English dancer. The two youngest of their three children were daughters Yioda, born in 1958, and Melanie, born in 1960. The youngest of all, and the only son, was Georgios, who arrived in 1963.

  The family spent most of his childhood in Kingsbury, London, where Georgios attended Roe Green Junior School and then Kingsbury High School. According to what he later told BBC's Desert Island Discs, his passion for music followed a head injury he suffered at around the age of eight.

  When Michael was in his early teens the family relocated to Radlett, and he began attending Bushey Meads School in Bushey. It was there that he picked up the nickname "Yog" and met Andrew Ridgeley. The two shared the same ambition. Michael started busking on the London Underground, performing songs including "'39" by Queen. He worked as a DJ at the Bel Air Restaurant in Northwood and at clubs and schools around Bushey, Stanmore, and Watford. He and Ridgeley, along with Ridgeley's brother Paul, Andrew Leaver, Jamie Gould, and David Mortimer (later known as David Austin), briefly formed a ska band called the Executive.

  That short-lived band dissolved, but the friendship with Ridgeley did not. The two moved forward together, and when Michael prepared to step into the public eye, he made one decisive choice first: he legally changed his name from Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou to George Michael.

• 3. Wham! and the World

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  Wham! formed in 1981, and the duo moved fast. Their debut album Fantastic reached number one in the UK in 1983, producing a string of top ten singles including "Young Guns", "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)", and "Club Tropicana". Make It Big, their second album, topped the charts in the United States.

  In November 1984, Michael joined the ensemble of British and Irish pop stars who recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for Band Aid. He sang his lines third, after Paul Young and Boy George. The single became the UK Christmas number one and sold 3.75 million copies in the UK alone. That same week, Wham!'s own "Last Christmas" sat at number two. Michael donated the royalties from "Last Christmas" to Band Aid and separately donated the profits from "Everything She Wants" to charity.

  On the 13th of July 1985, Michael sang "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with Elton John at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. That same year, in April, Wham! became the first Western popular music act to tour China. Their manager, Simon Napier-Bell, had spent eighteen months persuading Chinese officials to allow the visit. The audience included members of the Chinese government. Chinese television presenter Kan Lijun, the on-stage host, described the scene plainly: "No-one had ever seen anything like that before. All the young people were amazed and everybody was tapping their feet." The tour was documented by film director Lindsay Anderson and producer Martin Lewis in Wham! in China: Foreign Skies.

  Wham! officially separated in 1986. Their farewell single, "The Edge of Heaven", reached number one on the UK chart in June of that year. The finale concert at Wembley Stadium included the world premiere of the China film. Michael had already received the first of his three Ivor Novello Awards for Songwriter of the Year in 1985, from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

• 4. Faith and Its Aftermath

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  Early 1987 brought a duet with Aretha Franklin: "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", a one-off project that topped the charts in both the UK and the US. For Michael it was his third consecutive solo number one in the UK, and the first solo single he had not written himself. The co-writer, Simon Climie, was then unknown. Michael and Franklin won a Grammy Award in 1988 for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

  The first single from Faith, "I Want Your Sex", was banned by many radio stations in the UK and US because of its lyrics. MTV broadcast the video only during late-night hours. American Top 40 host Casey Kasem refused to say the song's title on air. Despite the censorship, the track reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and number three in the UK. The second single, "Faith", followed in October 1987 and sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for four consecutive weeks, becoming the best-selling single of 1988 in the United States.

  Released on the 30th of October 1987, the album Faith spent 51 non-consecutive weeks in the top ten of the Billboard 200, including twelve weeks at number one. Four singles from it, "Faith", "Father Figure", "One More Try", and "Monkey", all reached number one in the US. The album was certified Diamond by the RIAA for ten million US sales and eventually surpassed 25 million copies worldwide. It won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 31st Grammy Awards, held on the 22nd of February 1989.

  But Michael later described the entire Faith cycle as leaving him exhausted, lonely, and frustrated. The promotional machinery, the videos, the tour, and the awards had taken him far from the people he cared about. In 1990, he told his record company Sony that he would not promote his second album the way he had promoted Faith. That decision set him on a collision course with the label.

• 5. The Lawsuit and Listen Without Prejudice

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  Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 was released in Europe on the 3rd of September 1990. The title itself signalled his intentions. Michael refused to appear in the music videos or to do any promotion. The video for "Freedom! '90", directed by David Fincher, featured Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, and Cindy Crawford lip-syncing in his place. The album reached number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the US Billboard 200, spending 88 weeks in the UK chart.

  The expected follow-up, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2, was scrapped when Michael entered into a legal dispute with Sony. Instead, he donated three songs to the charity project Red Hot + Dance, which raised money for AIDS awareness, and gave the royalties from "Too Funky" to the same cause.

  In 1991, he released an autobiography through Penguin Books titled Bare, co-written with Tony Parsons. That same year, on the 20th of April 1992, he performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium, singing "Somebody to Love" before 80,000 people. He later reflected: "It was probably the proudest moment for me of my career, because it was me living out a childhood fantasy, I suppose, to sing one of Freddie's songs in front of 80,000 people."

  All proceeds from the Five Live EP, recorded at that concert and during Michael's Cover to Cover tour, went to the Mercury Phoenix Trust. The EP debuted at number one in the UK and several European countries.

  In November 1994, Michael appeared at the first MTV Europe Music Awards and performed a new song, "Jesus to a Child". It was a tribute to his Brazilian partner, Anselmo Feleppa, a dress designer he had met at Rock in Rio in January 1991. Six months into their relationship, Feleppa discovered he was HIV-positive. Feleppa died of an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage in March 1993. "Jesus to a Child" entered the UK Singles Chart at number one upon its commercial release in 1996, and ran nearly seven minutes, making it Michael's longest UK top-40 single.

• 6. Coming Out and Public Scrutiny

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  On the 7th of April 1998, Michael was arrested for engaging in a lewd act at the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, California. The arresting officer was undercover policeman Marcelo Rodriguez. Michael pleaded no contest to the charge, was fined US$810, and sentenced to 80 hours of community service. He subsequently released a video for "Outside" that satirised the incident with men in police costumes. Rodriguez filed a US$10 million lawsuit against Michael in California; the court eventually ruled that, as a public official, Rodriguez could not recover damages for emotional distress.

  The arrest forced the public disclosure of Michael's homosexuality. He had disclosed his bisexuality to Andrew Ridgeley at the age of 19. He told one of his sisters but kept it from his parents. In a 1999 interview with The Advocate, he told editor-in-chief Judy Wieder: "I never had a moral problem with being gay. I thought I had fallen in love with a woman a couple of times. Then I fell in love with a man, and realised that none of those things had been love." In 2007, he said that hiding his sexuality had made him feel fraudulent, and that the arrest in 1998 was, in his own view, a subconsciously deliberate act.

  His legal troubles continued across the 2000s. In February 2006, he was arrested for possession of Class C drugs and cautioned. In 2007, he pleaded guilty to drug-impaired driving in Cricklewood and was banned from driving for two years and sentenced to community service. On the 4th of July 2010, CCTV captured him crashing his car into the front of a Snappy Snaps store in Hampstead. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight weeks in prison and a five-year driving ban. He served four weeks at Highpoint Prison in Suffolk before being released on the 11th of October. In the dent his car had left in the shop wall, someone had written the graffito "Wham!".

• 7. Private Generosity

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  After Michael's death in December 2016, a series of private acts of charity became public. Childline confirmed he had donated millions to them anonymously over the years. He had also quietly supported the Terrence Higgins Trust and Macmillan Cancer Support.

  After watching a contestant on the quiz show Deal or No Deal reveal she needed £15,000 for IVF treatment, Michael reportedly called the production team and paid for it anonymously. On the 3rd of January 2017, another woman came forward with her family's permission to reveal that Michael had anonymously paid for her IVF treatment after she discussed her difficulties conceiving on the television programme This Morning in 2010. She gave birth to a daughter in 2012.

  Michael once gave a student nurse working as a barmaid a tip of £5,000 because she was in debt. For the decade before his death, he anonymously funded the Christmas tree and Christmas lights in Highgate, and was the largest funder of Highgate's annual Fair in the Square, donating as "a local resident".

  In 2003, he and Ronan Keating appeared together on the UK edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and won £32,000 for charity. He performed a free concert for NHS nurses in London in 2006 to honour the staff who had cared for his late mother. In 2007, he sent the £1,450,000 piano John Lennon used to compose "Imagine" on a peace tour of the United States, stopping at sites of significant violence including Dallas' Dealey Plaza.

  From 2005 until his death, Michael was a patron of the Swan Lifeline charity. A neighbour involved with the organisation had asked him if he was interested after swans took up residence in the river at the end of his Highgate garden. He agreed immediately. His £97 million estate, revealed in his will, was left largely to his sisters, his father, and friends.

• 8. Last Years and Legacy

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  In November 2011, Michael fell gravely ill with pneumonia during his Symphonica Tour. Vienna General Hospital admitted him on the 21st of that month, and by the 25th his condition had worsened. He slipped into a coma and spent time in an intensive care unit. He was discharged on the 21st of December. He told the press he had undergone a tracheotomy and that the hospital staff had saved his life. After waking, he briefly spoke with a West Country English accent, prompting concern that he had developed foreign accent syndrome.

  In February 2012, two months after leaving hospital, Michael made a surprise appearance at the Brit Awards at the O2 Arena in London, received a standing ovation, and presented Adele the award for Best British Album. The final concert of his career was performed at London's Earls Court on the 17th of October 2012.

  His album Symphonica, produced with Phil Ramone and released on the 17th of March 2014, became his seventh solo number-one album in the UK. It was Ramone's last production credit.

  After his death, "Last Christmas" finally reached number one on the UK Singles Chart on New Year's Day 2021, more than 36 years after its original release in 1984. In November 2023, Michael was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Andrew Ridgeley, the friend he had met at school in Bushey, served as his induction presenter.

  On the 10th of March 2026, George Michael Entertainment announced that a concert film, George Michael: The Faith Tour, documenting his 1988 concerts at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, would receive a worldwide theatrical release, accompanied by a live album featuring eighteen previously unreleased tracks.