On top of all this, Horgios Criocas Paniato was, like me and Andrew Ridgely of Wham,
It is not known widely enough that Michael's maternal grandmother was Jewish,
He also had a family history of severe mental illness, like me,
the child of a migrant and of minority ethnic extraction.
Ridgely's father Albert was born in Alexandria to an Italian mother and a Jewish Egyptian father,
with both an uncle and a grandfather on the mother's side of his family having died by suicide.
If British imperialists had not been involved in India, Suez and Cyprus, then Ridgely,
and that his father, Kayakas Paniato, arrived in England in 1953 as a Greek Cypriot immigrant.
whose father came by boat from Egypt in 1956 during the Suez crisis, Michael
the having to stay quiet in the house because your dad was working night shifts,
named him the greatest pop star of the year in 1988. "Having established that Wham was going to be a successful group,
Inevitably, there are parallels between our imperial immigrant experiences.
and I would not have been born in Britain, if at all.
the posing in photographs that we considered macho at the time but really in fact looked quite gay.
I think that it really dawned on me after about six or eight months
Apparently, the Paniato family story goes that when Jack Panos, his Anglicised name,
The kids really love that playhouse, huh?
And as I delved deeper into Michael's story, I discovered further parallels within the parallels:
There's also the fact that we both came from unartistic backgrounds but ended up in creative fields.
that there was something really big to come out of it. I'd never really seen stardom above top of the pops,