Elton John has claimed that George Michael “didn’t want” to live any longer when he died of a heart attack on Christmas Day in 2016.
The singer reflected upon his friend’s life during an appearance on Sharon Osbourne‘s TV show The Talk and revealed he tried and failed at getting the Wham! star to seek help for his addictions.
“He couldn’t get it, George. And he resented the fact that I had hinted that maybe he change his life a little bit and he’d be happier if he tried something else.
He continued: “The person has actually got to want it. It’s like me in the end; I really wanted it. I had two alternatives: one, to die, and one to live, and I wanted to live. But that’s the difference if you want it, and poor George didn’t want it.”
He said that Osbourne’s husband, Ozzy, had said the same thing to him over the phone just after Michael's death.
“I was in Aspen and Ozzy got on the phone, and he said, ‘He didn’t want to be here.’ And I thought that’s the most succinct, apt thing: he didn’t want to be here.”
John also suggested that his sexuality made him unhappy.
“He was so uncomfortable in his skin about being gay even though he said he wasn’t,” John told Osbourne.
In 2017, coroners ruled Michael’s cause of death as a “dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver.”
Dilated cardiomyopathy is a condition in which the left ventricle of the heart becomes stretched and weakened, which limits the heart’s ability to pump blood. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle.
John recently released a new memoir, in which he reignited his feud with Madonna, whom he says was "ungracious and nasty" to Lady Gaga at the start of her career.
