George Michael was born on June 25, 1963. For a decade beginning in the mid-1980s, Michael was one of America’s biggest pop stars, topping the charts with 11 #1 hit singles. His success lasted even longer in England, where he continued producing hit songs into the mid-2000s.
Michael’s career began as part of the band Wham!, which he formed in 1981 with high school classmate Andrew Ridgeley. Their first album, Fantastic, made them instant stars in the UK, and landed four singles in the top ten.
American success for Wham! came with their second album, 1984’s Make It Big. “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Everything She Wants,” and “Careless Whisper” were all #1 hits. There were already hints in that success, though, that the band might not last much longer. When “Careless Whisper” was released as a single, it was credited to “Wham! featuring George Michael” in the United States, and as a Michael solo in much of the world.
Michael took part in the 1984 Band Aid charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which was the #1 Christmas single in the UK that year. (There is a tradition in England of being very excited about which song is #1 at Christmas; it is often a holiday song, a charity project, or a novelty song.) Kept out of the #1 Christmas spot by Band Aid was Wham!’s own holiday song, “Last Christmas;” both songs have become holiday perennials.
Michael donated his royalties from “Last Christmas” to African famine relief, the cause to which Band Aid was dedicated. Throughout his career, Michael was a generous donor to a wide range of causes and charitable organizations. He was particularly devoted to children’s issues and to HIV/AIDS awareness, and on a few occasions, donated money anonymously to help pay medical bills of people he’d seen on television.
Wham! released its final American album, Music from the Edge of Heaven, in 1985. (It was released as The Final in England, with a somewhat different selection of songs that made it more of a greatest hits album.) “I’m Your Man” was the biggest hit from the album, and as “Careless Whisper” had been, “A Different Corner” was credited to Michael as a solo artist when it was released as a single.
Wham! ended their career by becoming the first Western pop act to tour China. It took eighteen months for the band’s manager to get permission from the Chinese government to make the trip, and audiences gave Wham! a rapturous reception.
As a solo act, Michael showed no signs of losing the momentum that Wham! had built up. He recorded a duet with Aretha Franklin, “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me,” that hit #1 and won a Grammy Award.
The first single from Michael’s debut solo album, Faith, caused some controversy. The provocative video for “I Want Your Sex,” along with the bluntness of the title, kept some radio stations from playing the record. When the song became a hit, Casey Kasem wouldn’t even say the name on his weekly American Top 40 radio show; he would only introduce it as “the new single from George Michael.” But a hit it was, one of six singles from the album to reach the top five on the pop charts, as Faith made its way to a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
Michael was exhausted by the promotional process for the album—making videos, touring, giving interviews—and told Sony Records that he wouldn’t do any of that for his next album. He was afraid that he was being seen only as a sex symbol—and it’s true that the “Faith” video, featuring Michael in sunglasses, leather jacket, and jeans, was one of the most memorable images of 1980s pop music—and wanted to be taken seriously as a singer and a songwriter.
That desire to be taken seriously was clear in the title of Michael’s 1990 album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. And he followed through on his refusal to do promotion. The video for lead single “Praying for Time” was just the lyrics on a blank screen (the song went to #1 anyway), and the “Freedom ‘90” video features several supermodels lipsynching the lyrics, with Michael nowhere to be seen.
Even when he went on tour in 1991, the “Cover to Cover” tour wasn’t primarily about promoting the new album. The set list was mostly made up of Michael’s favorite songs by other artists. Among those songs was “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” when Elton John joined him on stage at his Wembley Stadium concert, the resulting duet was yet another #1 single.
The relationship between Michael and Sony records was growing increasingly strained. Each was angry that the other hadn’t done more to promote Listen Without Prejudice, and Michael filed suit in 1992, attempting to get out of his contract. The British courts ruled in Sony’s favor in 1994. During the lawsuit, Michael abandoned plans for an album to be called Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2, and donated three of the songs he’d recorded to the HIV/AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Dance.
Michael’s 1996 album Older was less successful in the United States than his earlier albums had been; of course, he’d been doing so well that “less successful” meant it only generated two top ten hits, “Jesus to a Child” and “Fastlove.” But in the UK it was his most successful album, landing six singles in the top three.
In 1998, Michael was arrested by an undercover policeman in a Beverly Hills park on charges of public lewdness, after which he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. It had been an open secret for some time, at least since he first performed “Jesus to a Child” in 1994; the song was a melancholy tribute to his recently deceased partner.
Michael pled no contest to the charges, paid a fine and did 80 hours of community service. His next video, for the song “Outside,” poked fun at the incident, and the officer who had arrested Michael filed a $10 million lawsuit. The court ruled against the officer in 2002, saying that a public official cannot recover damages for emotional distress related to his work.
For his 1999 album Songs from the Last Century, Michael offered no new songs of his own. The album was a covers project, devoted mostly to standards from the Great American Songbook, including “Where or When” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.”
The 2004 album Patience was another huge success in the UK, but in the States, Michael’s time seemed to have passed, and the album sold fewer than half as many copies as Older. Michael popped back into the American consciousness in 2008, when he took a recurring role in the TV series Eli Stone. The show’s main character saw Michael in visions as a sort of guardian angel, offering him advice through songs. Each episode of the show’s first season was given the title of one of Michael’s songs.
Michael released his last album, Symphonica, in 2014. It was a live album, at least partly; Michael’s vocals had been recorded live during concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, but the string arrangements were recorded in the studio. It was another album with no new songs from Michael; he sang a few of his hits, along with another wide-ranging assortment of songs from other artists.
Michael died at home in his sleep on December 25, 2016. The cause of death was determined to be natural causes, related to heart problems.