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George Michael: The Generous Super Gifted Singer Who Struggled With Drug And Sex Addiction

By Tito Ojo-Medubi
Published on: 07:30 PST, Dec 26, 2016

George Michael secretly gave millions to the needy, but his successful career was dogged by drugs and sex addiction.

George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley in the United Kingdom on June 25, 1963. His father was a Greek Cypriot restaurateur while his mother was an English dancer. Michael wanted more out life and described the lives of his parents as “patriarchal and oppressive.”

He tried finding work as a DJ but finally opted to form a band with a school mate. At 18, in a basement flat, they penned their first hit, Club Tropicana. The song which celebrated the pleasures of drinking cocktails on a sunny holiday was a hit. The anthem made Michael and his friend, Andrew Ridgeley instant celebrities.

In 1982, they formed the pop group, Wham! George Michael was the sexier half of the pop duo, sporting loopy earrings, plenty of hair and a fake body tan. The group enjoyed a slew of massive hits including, Young Guns (Go For It) and Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) and Wake Me Up Before You Go. Wham! enjoyed a No. 1 album with Fantastic and scored another No. 1 album with Make It Big in the United Kingdom.

The group split up in 1986 and George Michael went on to have an even bigger career as a solo artist, having over seven No. 1 hits in the United Kingdom, eight No. 1 hits on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 charts and selling over 100 million albums worldwide. His first solo album, Faith, sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. He is regarded as one of the most successful artists ever to come out of the United Kingdom.

However, underneath his mega-watt smile was a man with a dark past battling drug demons and sex addiction, according to the Daily Mail. These things could easily have obliterated any celebrity’s life span, but Michael soldiered on all through the controversies. His fans forgave him every time and never stopped loving him. During a candid moment, the Careless Whisper singer would confess that he was even “surprised that he had survived his own dysfunction.”

In 1998, George Michael who was 34 at the time, was arrested by a plainclothes police officer who had observed the pop singer “engaged in a lewd act.” Even though an officer of the Beverly Hills Police Department refused to elaborate on what he was caught doing, it was alleged that he was caught masturbating in a public restroom.

The super-gifted singer was sentenced to 80 hours of community service. He went on to come out as a gay man and release Outside, a cheeky song about his experience where he revealed that “I’d service the community, but I already have.” The video featured kissing policemen and urinals with silver disco balls.

The Father Figure crooner was smoking plenty of marijuana. At a point in his career, he was smoking up to 25 joints a day. Again, the singer admitted that personal tragedies left him “more stoned in those days … I was existing on a balance of Starbucks and weed.”

He battled depression, following the death of his lover, Anselmo Feleppa. The Brazilian died of an HIV-related illness in 1993. George also lost his mother to cancer in 1997. He struggled to write for a long time, depending on sleeping pills and the designer drug DHB to cope with his painful losses.

In 2007, he was found slumped behind a wheel and admitted to a charge of drugged driving. He lost his license for two years and was penalized with community service. In 2008, the then 45-year-old singer was arrested again for smoking crack cocaine in a public toilet. In July 2010, Michael crashed his car into a shop front under the influence of drugs. In September 2011, he was jailed for a second drug-driving offense and given an eight-week prison sentence, according to the BBC.

He came out of prison claiming he had changed and energized to make new music. He released his album Symphonica in 2014 but was rumored to be smoking crack cocaine again. Last year, he was getting treatment at the world’s most expensive clinic in Switzerland allegedly for depression and crack cocaine.

The Faith singer was also known to have a penchant for driving around town and picking up strangers for sex. He defended his reckless actions saying it offered a nicer way of getting “quick and honest sex than standing in a bar.” He told friend and popular British journalist Piers Morgan that one time he had 500 sexual partners in seven years, which amounted to one every five days.

Despite a life bedeviled by drugs and sex with strangers, George Michael was an extremely generous person. He once gave $6,000 to a barmaid to pay off a student loan. He also secretly gave close to $20,000 to a woman who said she was on TV show to win some money for her IVF treatment. At one time, he threw a free concert for nurses as a way to say thank you for the care they had shown his mother before she passed.

The 53-year-old donated millions to Macmillan Cancer Support, which helps people living with AIDS, the Terrence Higgins Trust, and Childline, a charitable organization which provides confidential phone counseling for young people. Childline founder, Esther Rantzen said the singer gave all the royalties of his 1996 smash, Jesus To A Child, to the organization and it was only one of his many good deeds. According to her, they despite his insistence of keeping things secret, they were planning to honor him before he passed.

“Over the years he gave us millions and we were planning next year, as part of our 30th anniversary celebrations to create, we hoped, a big concert in tribute to him—to his artistry, to his wonderful musicality but also thank him for the hundreds of thousands of children he helped…it is particularly tragic that Christmas, which was when he released Jesus to a Child, would be the time when we lost him.”

The 53-year-old died on Christmas day.

[Featured Image by KGC-30/STAR MAX/AP Images]

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