George Michael: portrait of a tortured and secret man

Within the boy band Wham! Then solo, George Michael will have chained the greatest successes: "Careless Whisper", "Faith" and the premonition "Last Christmas". The man with the 100 million albums dreamed from a great return. He even prepared an autobiographical documentary for 2017. The night of the New Year, George Michael wrote the last episode.

It's a macabre irony. George Michael, one of whose tubes began with the words "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart", succumbed on Christmas Eve to heart failure. A friend found him dead in bed. An early death - he was only 53 years old. George Michael was a complex man, surprising, much more interesting than his beginnings could have let him appear.

When he arrives on the pop scene in 1982, this Anglo-Cypriot, whose real name is Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, is only 19 years old, with long discolored hair and colorful outfits that attack the retina. With his accomplice Andrew Ridgeley it forms, in a musical landscape post-punk post-new wave very dark, the group Wham! This is not false, the singer will acknowledge thirty years later, evoking "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", "a hymn to the Cheesy. But it's also a great record that worked because there was a heart. " And talent!

1982: the joyful pop of the band Wham! overrides punk 1970s© REX FEATURES / SIPA

George writes, composes and interprets. The marketing product boy's band hides a real artist. And the young muscle who makes yell teenagers and their mothers, a homosexual. George Michael would have liked to make his coming out at 20 years but the time does not lend itself to it. AIDS decimates the community and it does not want to frighten neither its mother nor the fans ... The truth will wait. When he appears in Perfecto, cross to ear and incipient beard, on the cover of his first solo disc, "Faith", in 1988, the shock comes: George Michael is beautiful as a Cypriot god, a male who does not Plays no ambiguity.

These dear 1980s saw the boyfriend Elton John marry a woman and George Michael display with another, to sow a doubt more and more tenacious ... His music evolves, finished, the marshmallow, Influences, from Prince to Aretha Franklin. The disc, which has sold 20 million copies, listens like a classic and armed with its "faith", the son of restaurateur of East Finchley becomes the equal of the prophets of the moment, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. Prince George of Pop will never find such summits.

The idol for ladies lives its first great love story with Anselmo, a Brazilian met in 1990

The 1990s show up and with them disappear carelessness, youth. It unveils a second album that sells very well but less than the previous, scarves with his record company, Sony, which he attacks in court. These cuisines require him to make "Faith" repeatedly! He will lose this long battle, no longer wish to express himself in the press, nor to appear in his clips.

Read also: In interview, the greatest hits of George Michael

Coup de genie: top models Linda, Cindy and Naomi in their heyday parade and minaudent for him in the video "Freedom 90! "Carried out by him. Will George Michael be seduced by one of these sublime girls? Nothing less true. The idol for ladies lives its first great love story with Anselmo, a Brazilian met in 1990. A romance that ends tragically, Anselmo dies of AIDS in 1993, before the arrival of tritherapies. George Michael will take months to recover, even if nothing publicly appears. Hardly on foot, four years later, he lost his mother.

The prince of the charts and the people's princess, in 1994.© REX FEATURES / SIPA

This decade is cursed. Many close, the director of his clips, his personal assistant since his beginnings, disappear in their turn. He would like to say what he is and that everyone has guessed, but he procrastinates, does not cross the obstacle. The Los Angeles police will help him in 1998. A plainclothes policeman charges him in a Beverly Hills park. George can not resist so much charm. He is arrested in the pissotiere for indecent assault. Great scandal. Rather than apologize as a vulgar Hugh Grant caught the hand in the bag with a prostitute, George chose the attack. In a television show he denounces police methods, claims to be gay, and, above all, proof of his humor, composes a song that tells of this experience, "Outside".

The advice he would give to young George Michael? "Get rid of your hair dryer!"

In appearance everything is better. He has a new boyfriend, Kenny, reconciled with Sony, fills the rooms. The facade, however, cracks. He consumes marijuana like a Jamaican, smokes crack cocaine, drinks more than reason. Asleep, he drowns his car in a store, falls on the highway of his vehicle on the move ... The artist is bored in his London palace, he multiplies the arrests, to the point of spending a month behind bars in 2010 "They locked me up with pedophiles and I was harassed, I suppose you can call it that. I almost did not leave my cell. "What one took for the depression of a star in bad sensations is undoubtedly linked to a disease that gnaws at him ... But he is a warm, sharp, Talkative and funny who receives the press in a London hotel in the summer of 2011. The advice he would give young George Michael if he met him today? "Get rid of your hair dryer!"

Final stage of metamorphosis: the closure of the London Olympics on August 12, 2012.© AP Photo / ABACA

Then he spoke in a more serious tone. "My real advice would be this: do not sell yourself as a sexual object. If I had not played on this sexy man image, I would have been much happier. I did not know how to act as a homosexual that thousands of women found attractive. "During the interview at Paris Match, an assistant came into the room to hand him a paper. A huge smile was then drawn on his face, once the reading was finished. George was thrilled to announce the closing of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper, "News of the World". He who made tabloids more often for his escapades than for his music, appears in full bliss. At that moment George Michael seemed to have life in front of him. Six months later, pneumonia failed to dislodge him, he will remain bedridden a month in a hospital in Vienna, to get out ... on a Christmas day.

George Michael has lived his last years in semi-reclusive, oscillating between detoxification and recordings. These days, he worked on a documentary retracing his career. Christmas will be more sad without him.