Tributes poured in from the music world yesterday after British pop superstar George Michael, who rose to fame with the duo Wham! and had a string of smash hits including Last Christmas, died aged 53.
Michael died of apparent heart failure on Christmas Day at his home in Goring, a village on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, after an award-winning career spanning more than three decades.
Big names in entertainment such as Elton John and Madonna hailed Michael’s talent and human qualities, while former Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley said he was “heartbroken at the loss of my beloved friend.”
Michael won awards including two Grammys and three Brits, but run-ins with the law over drugs, and a series of bizarre incidents and health scares in his last years often overshadowed his music.
Police said they would be conducting a post-mortem examination and were treating the death as “unexplained, but not suspicious.”
His manager Michael Lippman told Billboard magazine that the cause of the star’s death was heart failure.
Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou to a Greek Cypriot father and English mother in north London in 1963.
He met Ridgeley at high school and the pair went on to form Wham! in 1981.
In 1985, Wham! became the first Western pop band to perform in China as the country was slowly beginning to open up to the outside world under former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).
Following years of speculation over his sexuality, Michael came out as gay in 1998 after being arrested for committing a lewd act in the public toilet of a Los Angeles park.
It was the first of several run-ins with the law.
He notched up police cautions for cannabis and crack cocaine possession, and in 2010 was sentenced to eight weeks in jail after crashing his car into a London shop while under the influence of cannabis and prescription medication.
In 2011, he spent several weeks in hospital in Vienna after contracting pneumonia, later saying that he had been close to death.
There were fresh concerns in 2013 when he had to be airlifted to hospital after falling out of his chauffeur-driven Range Rover as it traveled at high speed.
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