George Michael, the English singer, songwriter, and record producer who rose to fame as a member of Wham!, has died, his publicist confirms. He was 53.
"It is with great sadness that we can confirm our beloved son, brother and friend George passed away peacefully at home over the Christmas period," Michael's London-based publicist Connie Fileppello said in a released statement.
"The family would ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult and emotional time. There will be no further comment at this stage."
The BBC was the first to report Michael's death. The news outlet said police stated there were no suspicious circumstances.
Born Georgios Panagiotou in North London — his father was a Greek immigrant — Michael met another aspiring musician, Andrew Ridgeley, while both were attending secondary school in Hartfordshire. By 1982, they were recording together as the bubble-gum duo Wham!, who by 1984 would be among the world’s most popular acts, with bouncy hits such as Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Freedom becoming staples of the early MTV era.
One song from Wham!’s American breakthrough album, Make It Big, was credited to Michael as a solo artist when it was released as a single: the lovelorn ballad Careless Whisper, which reached No. 1 in the U.K., the USA and various other countries. That feat and subsequent well-received solo turns, including a duet with Aretha Franklin (1987’s I Knew You Were Waiting for Me), led many to suspect that Wham!’s frontman had abilities and ambitions beyond making little girls scream.
Michael’s first solo album, 1987’s Faith, confirmed that. With six top fivesingles — among them the title track, the then-controversial smash I Want Your Sex and the rhapsodic Father Figure — Faith dominated the charts for much of 1988, and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide to date.
But Michael’s solo debut, which earned the 1989 Grammy Award for album of the year, was more than a commercial milestone. Faith’s artful blend of pop, funk and blue-eyed-soul textures made it the first album by a Caucasian artist to reach the top position on Billboard’s R&B chart. Michael’s intense creative involvement — he wrote all the songs, most independently, and also produced — helped reshape the template for pop acts of his ilk. Even Michael Jackson hadn’t been quite so autonomous, collaborating heavily with Quincy Jones and others on his ’80s megahits.
If Faith clearly demanded a new level of respect, some viewed Michael’s behavior in its wake as arrogant, not to mention self-defeating. He refused to actively promote a much-anticipated follow-up album, 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, not even appearing in the videos; for the hit single Freedom 90, he memorably tapped a bevy of supermodels, among them Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, to lip-sync the lyrics. Listen yieded other hits, notably the chart-topping first single Praving for Time, but did’t approach the massive success of its predecessor. Michael wound up suing his label, Sony Music, for not sufficiently supporting him, and a Vol. 2 was abandoned amid legal battles.
Michael continued to release albums through the ’90s, and eventually reconciled with Sony for 2004’s aptly titled Patience, his most recent studio effort. But in the USA, at least, he got more attention for his tabloid exploits. Longstanding questions about Michael’s sexual orientation came to the fore in 1998, when he was arrested for lewd behavior after revealing himself to another man, who turned out to be a police officer, in a public restroom in Beverly Hills.
Michael would later make light of the incident, and became more open about his homosexuality. Having lost a partner, Brazilian designer Anselmo Feleppa, to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1993, Michael began a long-term relationship a few years later, with Texas-born businessman Kenny Goss. The singer, whose charity work dates back to his participation in the 1984 Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, also raised money for AIDS research and terminally ill children.
There would be other run-ins with the law for Michael, who between 2006 and 2010 was arrested several times in London for possession of drugs and driving under the influence. Michael was last hospitalized in 2011 in Austria for pneumonia after postponing a series of concerts.
In 2004, the Radio Academy declared that his music had been played on British radio more than that of any artist between 1984 and 2004.
That year, Michael told USA TODAY that he “was kind of glad that my success level went down in America. I got more of a life, got to enjoy being in America, with less attention than I was used to in Europe. But now I’m strong again. I feel ready to take on the world.”
