It’s been almost six years for the reason that unexpected dying of George Michael at age 53 due to coronary heart failure in 2016.

Now the existence, career and legacy of the worldwide pop famous person are mentioned by those closest to him in the documentary George Michael: Portrait of an Artist, and in spite of the artist’s then-well-known public struggles friends and intimates take into account him great for his generosity and willpower to calling things as he noticed them.

“I suppose he might’ve desired the tale to be advised in his entirety,” Texas-primarily based businessman Kenny Goss, Michaels’ romantic associate of 15 years, tells people.  Goss sat for interviews in the new movie, as did a slew of Michael’s friends, friends and associates, such as Stevie Wonder, Rufus Wainwright, Stephen Frye, Terrence Trent d’Arby and Piers Morgan.

Even the movie’s director Simon Napier-Bell, who controlled the pop organization Wham!, which consisted of Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, enjoyed a long records and friendship with the singer.

Goss, sixty four, who changed into in a committed however open relationship with the pop idol from 1996 to 2009, notes that Michael’s regularly headline-making travails — report label battles, the 1997 arrest for soliciting sex in a Beverly Hills men’s room that outed him and a subsequent string of criminal missteps involving drug use, public sex and impaired driving — best screen how fallibly human and relatable the icon might be.

“Everyone’s were given an addict or someone it’s were given depression or struggling in a few manner in their circle of relatives, or they understand someone.

So you can relate to it,” says Goss, who stated that Michael’s peers all spoke on digital camera with compassion.

“They speak about it, but they speak approximately it with kindness due to the fact all of them loved him, and as a person, as a man or women.”

“It’s terrific how so many people idea alike in so many methods as I did approximately his generosity, his precise character, his talent,” has the same opinion Napier-Bell.

“We failed to find anyone  who had whatever awful to say about him. Lots of humans talked about matters he did which have been silly or now not realistic or now and again no longer excellent, however nothing awful standard. I mean, he became an artist, and artists are not predicted to act like fashions of society.”

Goss chuckles recalling one acquainted chorus from his occasional disagreements with Michael, which he says commonly sprang from trivial topics.

“One of his awesome strengths changed into that he simply concept you were not taking note of him in case you didn’t trust him,” he says with fun.

“He’d say, ‘Darling, you’re not taking note of me!'” At the quit of the day, compassion for others become what drove the pop superstar.

“He changed into a real humanitarian, from the top of his head to the top of his toe,” recollects Goss, who nonetheless heads the charitable basis he and Michael set up after they were together.

“He really believed in helping people, and he instilled that in me as nicely.

And it really is the issue that I try and do as an awful lot as I can, is do a honestly appropriate job with the foundation and lift a whole lot of cash and assist humans.”

As properly as he knew Michael, Napier-Bell says at some stage in the making of the movie he found new components of the superstar he’d formerly been blind to.

“One thing I did learn about him, which I failed to realize notwithstanding having managed him, is the way he wrote his lyrics without ever writing some thing down,” marvels Napier-Bell.

“Even when he’d written the lyrics in advance for a music, they didn’t get written down.

And it is some thing I learned in order that changed into excellent — I’ve in no way heard of another artist doing that.” The manager-turned-filmmaker says Michael become mainly pleased with his songwriting capabilities, to this sort of degree that once a music got here to him quite easily, like his first mega-destroy hit “Careless Whisper,” he might be dismissive of his own work.

“He regularly denigrated ‘Careless Whisper,’ which he wrote very quickly,” Napier-Bell reveals. “It came to him, he changed into sitting on a bus or some thing, and he just scribbled down the lyric.

But he changed into wrong to [knock it] because it really turned into certainly one of his virtually wonderful songs.

I think he did not like the idea that he [hadn’t] needed to assume intellectually approximately growing the lyrics — they had are available much like that.

They had been perfect — could not enhance on them — and I think it irritated him! He desired to consider himself as you have to sit down down and follow your self to put in writing.”

Napier-Bell become also taken aback to discover that Michael never rehearsed in public, recalling a performance of The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” at London’s Albert Hall.

“It’s a completely complicated tune; you actually must know what you’re doing … And he never rehearsed! There, inside the residence, he’d by no means sung a word,” Napier-Bell remembers.

“And it transpired that George did the whole thing in his car. He’d take the car out and go for a pressure … and then he might rehearse and sing and exercise.”

“He desired to be remembered now not as a notable musician, however as a wonderful songwriter,” provides Goss.

“He idea he had a very good voice, but it changed into honestly about the songwriting, and writing clever lyrics that human beings understand and relate to.”

Ultimately, Goss says, Michael believed in harnessing his skills for his humanitarian efforts, whilst he struggled with dependancy and melancholy.

“He had some problems at the cease of his life, however he constantly had a terrific coronary heart, and he become s a pleasant man who genuinely believed in assisting humans.

‘Who needs to be a rattling billionaire while human beings are ravenous? How an awful lot money do you actually need for your account?’ His philosophy became if he did not have the coins to help the hospitals, he’d say, ‘Borrow the rattling cash. I can constantly make more money. I’m a skilled man.'”

Michael and Goss remained warm and pleasant inside the years among their breakup and the singer’s passing, and Goss credits his ex with “giving me the tools that he gave me to move forward and do incredible things that most of the people do not get the opportunity to do.”

“Do I omit him? Yes,” Goss admits. But he feels assured that Michael has at remaining determined a degree of lasting peace that long eluded him in existence.

“At the cease of the day, when someone’s honestly stubborn like that, you simply want them to be satisfied, more than whatever else.

I always say whilst human beings question me approximately him, he changed into a tortured soul. He certainly turned into.

And I say he’s satisfied now, even if he is a blade of grass, fertilizing. I know that for positive. It’s not something that I even question for a second.”