Month: December 2016

Autopsy: George Michael’s Cause of Death ‘Inconclusive’

George Michael’s initial autopsy was ruled “inconclusive” after a post-mortem examination conducted on Thursday. Thames Valley Police announced Friday that further tests are needed, and results will not be known for several weeks, The Associated Press reports.

Michael, 53, died Christmas Day from apparent heart failure at his country home in Goring in Oxfordshire, England. Police are treating the singer’s death as “unexplained but not suspicious,” indicating they discovered no evidence of foul play.

After news broke about the former Wham! singer’s death, his representative issued a statement of “great sadness,” noting that Michael “passed away peacefully at home.” In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael’s partner Fadi Fawaz expressed his shock. “We were supposed to be going for Christmas lunch,” he said. “I went round there to wake him up and he was just gone, lying peacefully in bed. We don’t know what happened yet.”

Many of Michael’s friends and musical peers issued statements of condolences. “I have lost a beloved friend – the kindest, most generous soul and a brilliant artist,” Elton John wrote on Instagram. “My heart goes out to his family and all of his fans.”

“I don’t have the words,” Queen guitarist Brian May wrote on his website. “This year has cruelly taken so many fine people way too young. And George? That gentle boy? All that beautiful talent? Can’t begin to compute this. RIP George. Sing with Freddie. And the Angels.”

Debbie Reynolds, Mother of Carrie Fisher and Star of ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ Dies at 84

The actress received an Oscar nom for ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ and lost her husband to Elizabeth Taylor. Her daughter died just one day earlier.
Debbie Reynolds, the vivacious actress, dancer and pop star who wowed ’em in the musicals Singin’ in the Rain and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, died Wednesday, one day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher, passed away, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. She was 84.

“She’s with Carrie,” said Reynolds’ son, Todd.

Reynolds died Wednesday night after being hospitalized for a medical emergency. On Tuesday, her daughter, the Star Wars actress, author and screenwriter, died of complications from a heart attack she had suffered four days earlier while on a flight from London to Los Angeles.

Years earlier, Reynolds suffered heartbreak of another kind when her husband and Carrie’s father, pop singer Eddie Fisher, left her to be with actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Reynolds was given the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2015 by the Academy for her charitiable life’s work. She also had a No. 1 single with the sentimental ballad “Tammy,” toplined her own NBC sitcom for a season and was an energetic touring performer on stages and in showrooms for decades.

Reynolds became a sensation after starring with legendary hoofers Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in the immortal MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952), directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen. With the stars portraying performers caught up in the transition from silent films to talkies, the movie was voted the No. 1 musical of all time by the American Film Institute.

Reynolds received her only Oscar nomination for playing the title role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), based on the Broadway musical and fictionalized account of the life of a woman who survived the sinking of the Titanic. But Reynolds lost out to Julie Andrews in her debut film, Mary Poppins.

In between those two films, Reynolds was very much a headliner on the Hollywood gossip pages when her husband fell in love with Taylor following the death of Taylor’s husband, Around the World in 80 Days producer Michael Todd, in a March 1958 plane crash. Fisher was Todd’s best man when he married Taylor, and Reynolds had been a bridesmaid.

In 2010, Reynolds recalled how she found out her husband was cheating on her — lonely at home while Fisher was away on tour, she called Taylor at home to chat. To her surprise, Fisher answered the phone.

“Suddenly, a lot of things clicked into place,” she told the Daily Mail of London. “I could hear her voice asking him who was calling — they were obviously in bed together. I yelled at him, ‘Roll over darling, and let me speak to Elizabeth.’ ”

In her 2008 autobiography Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher described her parents’ breakup, which started when her dad “flew to Elizabeth’s side, making his way slowly to her front.

“He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and he ultimately consoled her with his penis,” Fisher wrote. “This made marriage to my mother awkward.”

The Reynolds-Fisher divorce became final on May 12, 1959 — Carrie was 2 at the time — and Taylor and Fisher were wed less than four hours later. Taylor would go on to divorce Fisher in 1964 after she fell for Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra (1963).

Reynolds did not talk to Taylor for seven years until she boarded the Queen Elizabeth with her second husband, shoe manufacturer Harry Karl, and discovered that Taylor also was on the ship. Reynolds sent her a note, and the two had dinner and “a lot of laughs.”

She divorced Karl in 1973. Reynolds also was married from 1984-96 to real estate developer Richard Hamlett.

In January 2015, she was the recipient of the Life Achievement Award at the SAG Awards. “In [Molly Brown] I got to sing a wonderful song called, ‘I Ain’t Down Yet.’ … Well, I ain’t.”

However, Reynolds recently had been saddled with health problems and was unable to attend the Governors Awards in November 2015 to accept her Hersholdt award on stage.

Mary Frances Reynolds was born April 1, 1932, in El Paso, Texas. At age 7, her family moved to Burbank, and at age 16, the 5-foot-2 former Girl Scout was signed to a contract at Warner Bros.

After appearing in bit roles in such films as June Bride (1948) and The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady (1950), Reynolds attracted the attention of MGM. The studio gave the fresh-faced teenager a small but significant part as singer Helen Kane (“I Wanna Be Loved by You”) in the Fred Astaire starrer Three Little Words (1950), then signed her to a seven-year contract.

In her next film, Two Weeks With Love (1950), Reynolds scored a hit song with a remake of “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a duet with Carleton Carpenter that made it to No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart.

After the success of Singin’ in the Rain, Reynolds spent the rest of a busy decade starring as good-natured girls in such musicals and light-hearted comedies as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953) opposite Bobby Van; Donen’s Give a Girl a Break (1953); Susan Slept Here (1954) with Dick Powell; Athena (1954) and Hit the Deck (1955), both alongside Jane Powell; The Tender Trap (1955) with Frank Sinatra; Bundle of Joy (1956), with Fisher at the height of their relationship; The Catered Affair (1956), as the daughter of Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine; Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), playing a backwoods innocent opposite Leslie Nielsen; and The Gazebo and It Started With a Kiss, two 1959 films in which she was coupled with Glenn Ford.

In the 1960s, Reynolds made notable appearances in the epic How the West Was Won (1962), My Six Loves (1963) opposite Cliff Robertson, The Singing Nun (1966) and Divorce American Style with Dick Van Dyke.

The actress embarked on The Debbie Reynolds Show for the start of the 1969-70 TV season but quit the sitcom after getting into a fight with NBC over cigarette commercials. She surrendered her 50 percent interest in the show and later called the move the “stupidest mistake of my entire career.”

The series, produced by I Love Lucy’s Jess Oppenheimer, had Reynolds playing the wife of a sportswriter (Don Chastain). It lasted 26 episodes.

In 1981, she welcomed visitors to Hawaii for the short-lived ABC series Aloha Paradise. Her other TV appearances included episodes of Madame’s Place, Alice, The Love Boat, Hotel, The Golden Girls, Wings, Roseanne, Rugrats and Will & Grace (as Debra Messing’s entertainer mother).

In 1996, Reynolds received a Golden Globe nomination for playing Albert Brooks’ mom in Mother (1996). In 2013, she appeared as another mother, that of Liberace (Michael Douglas), in Steven Soderbergh’s HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra.

Her recording of “Tammy” spent five weeks at No. 1 in 1957 and was nominated for an Academy Award for best original song (Reynolds performed it during the 1958 Oscar ceremony.) The tune gave Reynolds the distinction of being the only woman to have a No. 1 record in the span between July 28, 1956, and Dec. 1, 1958.

Reynolds also scored top 25 Billboard hits with “A Very Special Love” in 1958 and “Am I That Easy to Forget” in 1960.

On stage, Reynolds earned a Tony Award nomination for the 1973 revival of Irene and in the early 1980s replaced Lauren Bacall as the lead in the musical version of Woman of the Year. In 1989, she began a national tour with a production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Through the years, she was a constant presence in Las Vegas.

Reynolds amassed a huge collection of movie memorabilia during her career and auctioned off some of it in June 2011. Items included the white dress Marilyn Monroe wore over a subway grate in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch (the winning bid was $4.6 million); a pair of Judy Garland’s red slippers from The Wizard of Oz (1939); a Harpo Marx hat and wig; and costumes from Ben-Hur (1959) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

“I still have a lot of my things, but I decided to become rich,” she said at the time.

She put more items — like a hat that Vivien Leigh donned in Gone With the Wind (1939) and Gregory Peck’s military jacket from MacArthur (1977) — up for sale in May 2014.

Her son Todd is also from her marriage to Eddie Fisher. Survivors also include her granddaughter Billie Lourd.

Carrie Fisher, Actress, Author and ‘Star Wars’ Rebel Princess, Dies at 60

The daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, she carved out her own idiosyncratic career as a truth-telling Hollywood wit.
Carrie Fisher, the actress and writer best known for her iconic role as Star Wars’ Princess Leia, died on Tuesday morning after suffering a heart attack while onboard a flight from London to Los Angeles. She was 60.

Family spokesperson Simon Halls confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter.

“It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning. She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly,” Halls’ statement read.

A child of Hollywood royalty, Fisher carved out her own idiosyncratic career, enjoying her biggest onscreen popularity as Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy before going on to establish herself as an acerbic, truth-telling writer with such books as Postcards From the Edge. Her HBO special, Wishful Drinking, in which she recounted her unusual life, was nominated for an Emmy as outstanding variety, music and comedy special in 2011.

Born to actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher in 1956, Carrie Fisher grew up in a showbiz fishbowl — her parents divorced when she was just 2 after Eddie Fisher left Reynolds for actress Elizabeth Taylor in what at the time was a major tabloid scandal.

The young Carrie, who grew up in Beverly Hills, first stepped onstage when she was 15 to join her mother in the Broadway musical Irene. She made her film debut four years later in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo (1975), playing a precocious teen who seduces Beatty’s sexually adventurous hairstylist.

Appearing at Cannes in May to promote the documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, which HBO will air in March, Fisher joked, “I didn’t want to be in show business, and I think I did a very good job [of that].”

Nevertheless, she left her mark on the big screen. Star Wars (1977), in which she led the rebellion as Princess Leia, was only her second film and first starring role. She would reprise the part in the two sequels that rolled out in 1980 and 1983, and she returned to the character, in a now-mature incarnation, in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Fisher, who is thanked in the end credits of the new Star Wars spinoff movie Rogue One, was scheduled to appear in the next Star Wars movie, Episode VIII, scheduled for release on Dec. 15.

Fisher often spoke with ambivalence about Leia, telling Rolling Stone in 1983: “She has no friends, no family; her planet was blown up in seconds — along with her hairdresser — so all she has is a cause. From the first film, she was just a soldier, front line and center. The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry.”

However, in the wake of the success of The Force Awakens, Fisher appeared to have made peace with her onscreen alter-ego, attributing the success of the franchise to the fact that “this movie’s about family, Star Wars is. That’s why it has the appeal.”

And she received another Emmy nomination for a 2007 appearance on NBC’s 30 Rock, in which she played a crazy writer, spoofing her Star Wars dialogue with that episode’s last line: “Help me, Liz Lemon! You’re my only hope!”

When some fans criticized how the older Leia looked, Fisher took to Twitter. She admitted that some of the negative comments had hurt her — “unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings,” she wrote — but she also fought back, adding, “Youth & beauty R NOT ACCOMPLISHMENTS, they’re the TEMPORARY happy Biproducts of Time or DNA. Don’t hold your Breath 4 either.”

But while Fisher will always be associated with Leia and the princess’ famous hair buns, Fisher — who also appeared in such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), When Harry Met Sally … (1989) and Soapdish (1991) — drifted away from acting full-time and found a new identity as an author, screenwriter and all-around Hollywood wit.

Frankly addressing her own problems with substance abuse and bipolar disorder, she penned the 1987 hit novel Postcards From the Edge, an only slightly fictionalized version of her own life as a sometimes-depressed actress and the daughter of a major, and occasionally intimidating, Hollywood star. She went on to write the book’s screen adaptation for the 1990 film version, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

While serving as a script doctor on such films as Sister Act, Last Action Hero and The Wedding Singer, Fisher wrote several more novels as well as the memoirs Wishful Drinking (2008), which she later turned into a one-woman play, the 2011 HBO special; Shockaholic and, most recently, the recent The Princess Diarist.

Whenever she appeared on the Hollywood awards circuit to pay tribute to another star, Fisher could be counted on to offer up a wry observation that provoked laughter. Speaking at the 2004 AFI Life Achievement Award given to Streep, she recalled what it was like to have the Oscar-winning actress play her. “After Postcards premiered, I began daily to see the pain and disappointment in the eyes of my family and friends every time I wasn’t Meryl,” Fisher admitted. “There’s a name for this condition as it turns out — Merylnoma Streepdecoccus.”

Fisher — whose most constant companion in recent years has been her French bulldog Gary, who accompanied her everywhere — was married to musician Paul Simon from 1977-83 and during the course of her life had a series of other romances with high-profile men, including a recently revealed affair with Star Wars co-star Harrison Ford.

In addition to her mother, survivors include her daughter, actress Billie Lourd, whose father is CAA co-chairman Bryan Lourd; her brother Todd Fisher; and her half-sisters, actresses Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher.

2016: The year the music started to die

What happens when “live fast, die young” becomes “grow old, die slowly”?

Like it or not, we’re about to find out. There’s a Great Cull coming, and rock ’n’ roll music will never be the same.

If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that even pop’s most seemingly immortal figures are, in fact, quite mortal and destined for the grave just like the rest of us. It was an annus horribilis that began on a low note with the death of David Bowie just three days after the release of his blackly magical 27th albumBlackstar on Jan. 8 — and basically stayed down there in the depths for the next 12 months.

The pop deaths just kept coming: Prince, felled at 57 on April 21 by something as impossibly prosaic as an opiate overdose. The Eagles’ Glenn Frey. Merle Haggard. Prince Buster. Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest. Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire. Suicide’s Alan Vega. Sharon Jones. Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, whose twin departures from this plane rendered Emerson, Lake & Palmer a solo act within the space of just nine months. Canadian icon Leonard Cohen, too, of course, who predicted his own looming demise in Bowie-esque fashion with an album-length goodbye of his own, You Want it Darker, released just a couple of weeks before his very private death on Nov. 7 at 82 years of age. George Michael, announced on Christmas Day.

Scarcely a week would pass without the mention of another drummer here or another guitarist there of a certain age quietly saying goodbye forever — and this after the shock of the sudden death of whiskey-swillin’ metal survivor Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister at 70 just three days before the end of 2015.

The Canada-stunning announcement in May that Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip was fighting to survive against terminal brain cancer didn’t help matters much, either, even if the Hip’s triumphant farewell tour in the summer and the subsequent release of his noble Secret Path solo album in the fall proved inspirational rather than sad.

In any case, 2016 was not the happiest time to be a music fan. As the Georgia Straight put it, “About the only good thing that happened in 2016 was that Keith Richards didn’t die.”

Unfortunately, at some point Keith Richards, who just turned 73, is going to die, along with the rest of the Rolling Stones, who have played the poster boys for rock longevity for 50 years now but simply can’t keep it up forever. Time is on no one’s side, not even the Rolling Stones’.

And sadly, it’s only going to get worse.

Soon rock ’n’ roll’s entire first generation — the generation that made it the dominant musical force on the planet, anyway, although Chuck Berry turned 90 this year and they don’t come much more first-generation than that — will gradually leave us.

A world without David Bowie seemed inconceivable a year ago. Now imagine a world without Keith, without Mick Jagger (73), without Bob Dylan (75), without Paul McCartney (74), without Neil Young (71), without Pete Townsend (71), without Roger Daltrey (72), without Roger Waters (73).

It was no accident of timing that someone had the bright idea to bring all these oldsters together in California for the Desert Trip festival in October. It was a now-or-never kind of thing.

The opportunity to convene that group again will not present itself for long. And that fact makes you wonder for the future. As Syracuse University professor Theo Cateforis observed to AFP recently, in reference to the deaths of Prince and David Bowie: “Their passing allows us to reflect on what careers were like in previous eras — and that that kind of artist may be less and less frequent in the future.”

Still, while the loss of so many musicians over the past year has been a downer — as anything that forces one to repeatedly confront one’s own mortality tends to be — the graceful exits of Bowie and Cohen, as well as the life-affirming courage of our Downie in the face of the inevitable, have demonstrated that dying doesn’t necessarily mean defeat.

Now, obviously, you can’t beat the clock. But you can conjure amazing art from the contemplation of your imminent passing, as Bowie did with the wondrously cryptic and self-referential Blackstar and as Cohen did with the elegant, devilishly funny You Want it Darker.

You can use the time you have left to bring as much joy to yourself and to others as possible, as Downie and the Hip did this past summer, or to leverage your fate as an instrument of positive change, as Downie’s Secret Path has done by drawing the despicable legacy of Canada’s residential-school system out onto a mainstream platform.

It’s sad to lose our heroes, but we can take some comfort in knowing they maintained a commitment to artistry, that they never lost their passion for and their faith in the power of music until they took their last breaths.

Music is immortal, after all, even if we are not. That has to mean something.

Debbie Reynolds Says Daughter Carrie Fisher in ‘Stable Condition’

Carrie Fisher remains in stable condition following a heart attack, her mother Debbie Reynolds shared on Twitter on Christmas Day.

“Carrie is in stable condition. If there is a change, we will share it,” wrote the 84-year-old “Singin’ in the Rain” star. “For all her fans & friends. I thank you for your prayers & good wishes,” added Reynolds.

Fisher, who became a global icon as a teenager when she took on the role of Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” remains in a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday.

Since she was rushed from LAX to the UCLA Medical Center emergency room on Friday, messages of support poured out from the Hollywood community — as well as her “Star Wars” family — while her brother, Todd Fisher, has been issuing periodic updates to the press.

Here the other recent developments:

Fisher’s “Star Wars” co-star — and onetime lover — Harrison Ford issued a statement to media Saturday:

“I’m shocked and saddened to hear the news about my dear friend,” Ford said in the statement. “Our thoughts are with Carrie, her family and friends.”

“Star Trek” legend William Shatner tweeted a heartfelt Christmas wish focused on Fisher Saturday morning.

Late Friday, Fisher’s brother Todd told CNN that her condition had not changed from earlier in the day, when she was moved from the emergency room to intensive care:

“Carrie Fisher is still in the ICU,” Todd Fisher said.

Before that, he told ET he was waiting patiently for an update on her condition.

“She is in the intensive care unit, she is being well looked after,” Todd says. “If everyone could just pray for her that would be good. The doctors are doing their thing and we don’t want to bug them. We are waiting by patiently.”

The Los Angeles Times obtained audio of the conversation between the pilot and air traffic controllers Friday afternoon:

“We have some passengers, nurses assisting the passenger,” the pilot said. “We have an unresponsive passenger. They’re working on her right now. We’re going to have them seated in about two minutes and we’re going to hopefully be on the deck in about five.”

According to YouTube star Anna Akana, a fellow passenger on her flight, Fisher fell unconscious and stopped breathing about 10 minutes before the plane landed and was medically evacuated.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott told TheWrap on Friday that “at 12:11 p.m., the LAFD responded to LAX International Airport gate 74 for a patient on an inbound flight on cardiac arrest. Paramedics were standing by for the plane’s arrival and provided advanced life support and aggressively treated and transported patient to a nearby hospital.”

Representatives for Fisher have not yet responded to a request for comment.

George Michael, Pop Superstar, Has Died at 53

George Michael, the creamy-voiced English songwriter who sold tens of millions of albums in the duo Wham! and on his own, died on Sunday at his home in Goring in Oxfordshire, England. He was 53.

A police statement said: “Thames Valley Police were called to a property in Goring-on-Thames shortly before 2 p.m. Christmas Day. Sadly, a 53-year-old man was confirmed deceased at the scene. At this stage the death is being treated as unexplained but not suspicious.”

Mr. Michael was one of pop’s reigning stars in the 1980s and 1990s — first as a handsome, smiling, teenypop idol making lighthearted singles like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” with Wham!, then arriving as a grown-up pop sex symbol with his 1987 album “Faith.”

But Mr. Michael grew increasingly uncomfortable with the superficiality and relentless promotion of 1980s-style pop stardom. He turned away from video clips and live shows; he set out to make more mature statements in his songs, though he never completely abandoned singing about love and desire. Mr. Michael wrote supple ballads, like “Careless Whisper” and “Father Figure,” as well as buoyant dance tracks like “Freedom ’90” and “I Want Your Sex.” For much of his career, including his best-selling albums “Faith” and “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” he was also his own producer and studio backup band. Much of his music drew on R&B, old and new, but his melodic gift extended across genres.

Mr. Michael won a Grammy Award for “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),” a duet with Aretha Franklin, and “Faith” won the Grammy for album of the year. In Britain, he was showered with awards, and in 2004, Britain’s Radio Academy said he had been the most-played performer on British radio from 1984-2004.

In 1998, Mr. Michael came out as gay after being arrested on charges of lewd conduct in a men’s room in Beverly Hills, Calif. He had long lent his name and music to support AIDS prevention and gay rights. During interviews in later years, he described himself as bisexual, and said that hiding his sexuality had made him feel “fraudulent.” He also described a long struggle with depression.

During the 2000s, Mr. Michael’s output slowed; his last studio album of new songs was “Patience” in 2004. In later years, he put out individual songs as free downloads, encouraging listeners to contribute to charity. But in 2006, 25 years into his career, he could still headline stadiums worldwide.

“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,” his publicist Connie Filippello said in a 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.”

George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, London, on June 25, 1963, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur and an English dancer. In 1979, he and a schoolmate, Andrew Ridgeley, were members of their first band together, a ska band called the Executive. That didn’t last, but they continued to make music together — most of it composed and sung by Mr. Michael — and began releasing singles as Wham!, cultivating the image of carefree teenage rebels in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It!).” Their 1983 debut album, “Fantastic,” reached No. 1 in Britain; in the United States, the 1984 single “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” became ubiquitous on MTV and reached No. 1. In 1985, the duo became the first major Western pop group to tour China as part of its world tour, and Mr. Michael appeared at the Live Aid concert, broadcast worldwide, joining Elton John to sing “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”

The worldwide 1984 hit “Careless Whisper,” credited in Britain to George Michael solo and to Wham! featuring George Michael in the United States, signaled a turn away from perky teen fare. In 1986, Wham! dissolved, with a farewell show at Wembley Stadium. Mr. Michael had a No. 1 hit with “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),” his duet with Aretha Franklin, before releasing the album “Faith” in 1987. Its first single, “I Want Your Sex,” reached No. 2 in the United States, though it was seen as too risqué by some radio stations; Mr. Michael made an introduction to its video clip stating “This song is not about casual sex.” “Faith,” which hinted at both gospel and rockabilly, reached No. 1, and the album included three more No. 1 hits: “Father Figure,” “Monkey” and “One More Try”; it has sold more than 10 million copies in the United States.

But for the next album “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” released in 1990, Mr. Michael set out to jettison his pop persona. The autobiographical “Freedom ’90” declared his independence from the pop machine along with his determination to “stick around”; he didn’t appear in its video clip, which had models lip-syncing the lyrics. The album also included a No. 1 single, the ballad “Praying for Time,” and has sold two million copies in the United States, but after the blockbuster of “Faith” it was considered a commercial letdown.

Mr. Michael entered a protracted legal battle with Sony Music over his contract, and was unable to release another album until 1996. Its title, “Older,” was an unmistakable signal that he was no longer directly courting the youth market; he was 32 years old. But the album was an instant hit in England and Europe — it had six hit singles in England — though less popular in the United States. After the 1998 arrest, Mr. Michael released a greatest-hits album with two new songs; one, “Outside,” set its video clip in a men’s restroom. He made a 1999 album of cover songs, “Songs of the Last Century.”

In the early 2000s, Mr. Michael released songs protesting the invasion of Iraq including the 2002 “Shoot the Dog.” His last full studio album, “Patience,” was released in 2004, full of introspective ballads. Mr. Michael returned to performing; he joined Paul McCartney onstage during the Live 8 benefit concert. In 2006, he performed a world tour, paired with another collection of hits, “Twenty Five,” that included new duets with Mr. McCartney and Mary J. Blige. He continued to release individual songs sporadically, and in 2014, he released “Symphonica,” a collection of standards and his own songs recorded with an orchestra.

He had been planning an expanded reissue, due in 2017, of “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” paired with a documentary, “Freedom,” exploring his musical, personal and legal struggles.