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George Michael's final weeks: declining health as he battled pitfalls of fame

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As heartbroken friends and fans continued to mourn George Michael online and at his homes across Britain, questions swirled about the health and final weeks of the electrifying pop singer before his death on Christmas Day at the age of 53.

Once an indisputable sex symbol of the peak-MTV era, Michael appeared overweight and nearly unrecognisable in photographs, reportedly from September, that the website TMZ published on Monday.

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Fans mourn pop superstar George Michael

Grieving fans mourning the death of George Michael have laid flowers at his home in Goring, England, where the pop singer died of apparent heart failure.

News media attention also fell on a 2015 tabloid interview with a relative claiming Michael was abusing drugs and putting his life at risk.

And after years of arrests related to drug use, as well as confessional interviews and health scares, the singer had largely retreated from the public eye, while his creative output had all but ceased.

Paul Gambaccini, a radio and television presenter who had known Michael since youth and represented him during a 2011 tour, said in an interview that he was not surprised by the singer's death because Michael was "not completely well" and had a "close brush with death" five years ago when he nearly succumbed to a bout of pneumonia. Doctors had to perform a tracheotomy.

Police officials, who had announced Michael died in "unexplained but not suspicious" circumstances at his home in Goring-on-Thames, England, could not be reached for further details on Monday because of Boxing Day.

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The singer's manager, Michael Lippman, on Monday declined to elaborate on his statement that Michael had died of heart failure, "in bed, lying peacefully." Forensic experts said an autopsy report could be ready in a couple of days.

While admirers sought to focus on Michael's previously unreported donations and philanthropy, and neighbours remembered his charm as a low-key celebrity in their midst, a more complicated image of Michael's life in recent years loomed, as well.

Several friends and associates, while declining to discuss details of his health, noted that Michael had a long history of hard living. In 2007, he was sentenced to community service and barred from driving for two years after he had been found asleep at the wheel and under the influence of drugs. The next year, he was arrested in London on suspicion of possessing crack cocaine.

"I've done different things at different times that I shouldn't have done, once or twice, you know," Michael said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian, in which he discussed his ups and downs with sex, sleeping pills, marijuana and crack.

"People want to see me as tragic," he said. "I don't even see them as weaknesses anymore. It's just who I am."

In the summer of 2015, Michael and his publicists denied that he was facing serious drug addiction after a report published in a British tabloid, The Sun, quoted the wife of a relative saying, "I'm petrified he will die."

Michael responded on Twitter, "To my lovelies, do not believe this rubbish in the papers today by someone I don't know anymore and haven't seen for nearly 18 years." He added, "I am perfectly fine."

Rather than dwell on Michael's difficulties, some close friends on Monday highlighted another dimension of the man they knew, describing him as a generous benefactor given to quiet and spontaneous acts of kindness.

"He was a closet philanthropist," Gambaccini said.

Gambaccini recalled how in 1994 the British government cut aid to the Terrence Higgins Trust, an AIDS charity. To make up for the shortfall, Gambaccini, a patron of the trust, said he had sought to raise 300,000 pounds, about $A500,000. But in the end, he did not have to try too hard, he said. Michael donated most of the money.

"He never wanted public recognition," Gambaccini said.

The television presenter Richard Osman wrote on Twitter on Monday that Michael had secretly contacted a woman who appeared on Deal or No Deal, a British game show, to give her $US25,000 needed for an in vitro fertilisation treatment.

Sali Hughes, an author, wrote on Twitter that Michael had once tipped a waitress $US8500 "because she was a student nurse in debt." And Emilyne Mondo, a volunteer at a shelter for homeless people, posted that Michael had worked there anonymously.

"I've never told anyone," she said. "He asked we didn't. That's who he was."

For some neighbours of Michael, his turn away from the spotlight and toward personal privacy made him just another member of the community.

Amanda Holland, 56, a neighbour of Michael in Goring-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire, and an amateur actor, once invited him to a play in which she was performing. "He's an international superstar, I thought, 'There's no way he would come to a local thing,'" she recalled. "But he did, and he was fabulous, and he was kind and he was generous."

In a 2004 interview with the British edition of GQ, Michael spoke frankly about losing his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian, to AIDS in 1993. At the time of Feleppa's death, Michael was still in the closet, and the antiretroviral drugs that helped AIDS become a manageable disease, and not necessarily a fatal one, had yet to become widely available.

"I'm still convinced that had he been in the USA or London, he would have survived, because just six months later everyone was on combination therapy," Michael said in the interview.

"I think he went to Brazil because he feared what my fame would do to him and his family if he got treatment elsewhere. I was devastated by that."

Michael's mother died a few years later, leading to depression, he said. "Losing your mother and your lover in the space of three years is a tough one."

The New York Times