Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou into a Greek Cypriot family in London, George Michael formed Wham! with schoolfriend Andrew Ridgely in 1981. They reached the Top Ten with their second single ‘Young Guns (Go For It)’ in 1982. While still in Wham!, Michael released his first solo hit, ‘Careless Whisper’, in 1984. He released ‘A Different Corner’ in 1985 and shortly afterwards Wham! disbanded. His debut solo album, Faith, was released in 1987 and won the Grammy for Best Album in 1988. In the US, Faith was marked by six No.1 singles: ‘I Want Your Sex’, ‘Faith’, ‘Father Figure’, ‘One More Try’, ‘Monkey’ and ‘Kissing A Fool’. His next album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, yielded the hit ‘Praying For Time’, and 1990 also saw the release of Freedom 90 and its famous video featuring famous supermodels such as Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell.

George Michael continued to have hits in the 90s, including ‘Too Funky’, ‘Jesus to A Child’ and ‘Fastlove’. His 1996 album, Older, released after a lengthy legal battle with Sony to allow him to switch record labels, was one of his biggest-selling. His 1998 best of Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael, contained ‘Outside’, a tongue-in-cheek song referring to his arrest in 1998 for soliciting a police officer in Beverly Hills. His next album of original material, 2004’s Patience, reached the top five and yielded the single ‘Freeek!’ and the politically-charged ‘Shoot the Dog’. In recent years Michael has been touring extensively.

Website
http://www.georgemichael.com/

Trivia
George plays a guardian angel on Eli Stone, a new TV series that debuted in 2008 in America.