‘Barbara gave my Dad whatever he wanted. She was his partner in debauchery, depravity and decadence’: Why Freddie Mercury’s secret daughter blames his German actress lover for his tragic early death

Claiming to have been born following Freddie Mercury’s affair with a married Frenchwoman in the spring of 1976, someone called B first contacted me in 2021, hoping that, as the author of three biographies about Freddie, I could help her tell the truth about her father.

He had been very much part of her life, her mother and stepfather coming to a remarkable arrangement whereby Freddie had his own room at each of their homes in London, Switzerland and the south of France, and formed a strange parental triangle who together made all the important decisions about her upbringing.

She remained so close to Freddie that, shortly before his death in November 1991, he gave her the 17 notebooks he had filled with his handwritten thoughts on all aspects of his life.

These ranged from the trauma of the sexual abuse he endured at the hands of a schoolteacher when he was 14 – featured in yesterday’s extract of my biography of the star, Love, Freddie – to the extraordinarily deep and long-lasting relationship he had with

Mary Austin, described by B as ‘the wonderful woman who was to all intents and purposes his wife until death parted them’.

In disclosing the notebooks’ contents, B, now 48 and a sought-after medical professional with children of her own, wants to redress what she calls in today’s instalment ‘the lies, speculation and distortion’ about her father, not least the gay community’s refusal to accept that he was bisexual, rather than homosexual.

‘Those who seek to label Freddie as “gay” or “straight” are denying half his true feelings, emotions and needs,’ says B. ‘How he would have hated this. Above all, he would have loathed having been cast as a global gay icon’

While acknowledging her importance to Freddie at one point in his life, B confesses that she harbours some resentment towards actress Barbara Valentin, who died in 2002

During the final weeks of his life, Freddie Mercury began preparing for future Christmases and birthdays he would not be around for, buying presents to be delivered in the years to come.

Among them was a gift for his friend Elton John, who collected works by Henry Scott Tuke, a late 19th-century English artist who painted boats and naked boys.

Although thoughtful, it was very far from the kind of art Freddie collected himself according to B, the daughter he kept hidden from the world.

‘The only paintings of men in his possession were of himself, with his cats,’ she says.

‘And in his own art, he invariably drew or painted women.’

According to B, this reflected the fact that he regarded himself ‘not as gay but as bisexual. He said so in his own words and confirmed it in his own handwriting.

‘Those who seek to label Freddie as “gay” or “straight” are denying half his true feelings, emotions and needs. How he would have hated this. Above all, he would have loathed having been cast as a global gay icon.’

In Saturday’s Daily Mail I described her frustration at how the hit movie Bohemian Rhapsody, released in 2018 by the remaining members of Queen and their associates, did not portray Freddie accurately.

While nobody could compete with his feelings for Mary Austin, B points out that the film also completely ignores his involvement with Barbara Valentin, the flamboyant German actress who plunged him deeper and deeper into troubled waters.

‘Why would anyone deny something today that was obviously so important to Freddie during his lifetime?’ B asks. ‘No one can deny her significance in Freddie’s life throughout the two years that their relationship lasted.’

While acknowledging her importance to Freddie at one point in his life, B confesses that she harbours some resentment towards Barbara, who died in 2002.

‘Had she adopted the same attitude as Mary, and had she tried to keep Freddie’s feet on the ground rather than taking him deeper, his immune system might have resisted the virus for significantly longer.

‘Instead, she gave him whatever he wanted, and became his partner in debauchery, depravity and decadence.’

Freddie and Barbara met in Munich in 1983. By then, Queen had long been recording abroad for tax purposes and since they first began working in the Bavarian capital in the summer of 1979, Freddie had been monstrously promiscuous, sharing himself around with abandon.

‘In his journals, he refers to countless one-night stands,’ says B. ‘An eye-watering number, actually.’

‘The Monster’, as he described it, was taking Freddie further than he had ever wanted to go, and it was consuming him, despite an affair with rugged German restaurateur Winfried ‘Winnie’ Kirchberger, which also began in 1983.

‘The relationship was strong to begin with and had real potential: because Winnie loved Freddie for himself, not for who he was,’ says B.

‘He wasn’t showbizzie, he wasn’t impressed, he didn’t care about any of that and he was very down to earth. He was also a busy man.

‘He had his own business to run, with its many obligations.

‘When they first met, Freddie was calm, in a good state of mind, and was working on his solo album. But a few months later, when Queen’s The Works Tour kicked off, the usual problems began to rear their heads again.’

The minute Freddie got back on the road, he resumed his promiscuous lifestyle and indulged in so many one-night stands – it was almost as if he was trying to break a record.

‘When Winnie discovered that Freddie was being unfaithful to him, he hit back blow for blow,’ says B.

‘To begin with, he treated Freddie with indifference. He then began rejecting him, as well as his many gifts – including a brand-new Mercedes, which was delivered outrageously wrapped, complete with a huge ribbon bow, because Freddie never did anything by halves.’

When Winnie started treating him coldly, Freddie was at a loss.

‘He was bewildered,’ says B. ‘He couldn’t cope with being treated that way. What had he done to deserve it!’

In early 1984, Freddie moved out of Winnie’s home into drab furnished rooms at the apartment hotel where he happened to meet Barbara, a well-known local actress who lived opposite. Although the relationship with Winnie would continue, Freddie and Barbara also became lovers. It was at that point when Freddie entered his most hedonistic period yet.

Freddie Mercury’s spike studded amulet (circled) hid lesions during Live Aid 1985

Mary Austin (left) is described by B as ‘the wonderful woman who was to all intents and purposes his [Freddy’s] wife until death parted them’

‘Many individuals have denied that Freddie ever had a sexual relationship with Barbara,’ she reminds us. ‘But of course he had sex with Barbara. He says so himself!’

Their bond, B explains, ‘was built on Barbara’s unrestrained willingness to share her bed with Freddie and his male one-night stands, as a parody of love, acceptance and happiness.

‘Barbara gave him something that he must have needed to survive that period, but she was never able to give him what Mary had always given him.’

Although they bought a flat in Munich together, marriage to Barbara, we know from Freddie’s journals, was never discussed and it was out of the question that she should ever compete with Mary.

‘When Mary was travelling to Munich almost every week during the period when Freddie lived there, he would usually go to the hotel and stay with her, and they would sometimes stay at his flat. Whenever Mary was around, he was never to be found at Barbara’s or Winnie’s places.’

It was with Mary that he hoped to start a family one day – writing in his diaries of his intention to have only two children.

‘He didn’t want more,’ B reveals, ‘because as he said, he had only two arms. He needed to be able to hold his children at the same time. He had it all planned, all mapped out.’

According to his journals, Freddie wanted to get his penchant for a decadent lifestyle out of his system before having children with Mary.

But by his own admission, his life at that time was a mess. ‘All that sex devoid of love and emotion, playing one lover off against another, took its toll in the end.

‘He describes in his diaries how he lost respect for himself.’

That autumn, when word reached him that Tony Bastin, a former lover, had been diagnosed with AIDS, he momentarily became more abandoned than ever.

‘To begin with, he was in denial,’ B relates. ‘He threw himself into even more excessive and destructive behaviour, overdoing the alcohol, drugs and indulging in a furious amount of no-strings sex.’

‘I was extremely promiscuous,’ he told an interviewer early the following year. ‘It was excess in every direction.’

By the time of that interview, Freddie had changed his lifestyle dramatically, ceasing contact with Barbara and limiting himself to safe sex with the same partners in Munich and London, but his locking of the stable door proved futile. The nag had bolted.

‘In March 1985, he discovered his first lesion: just above the right armpit,’ says B. ‘A few months later a second lesion, larger than the first, appeared on the inner surface of his right arm.

‘In images captured during Queen’s iconic performance at Live Aid on 13 July that year, he can be seen wearing a spike-studded amulet high on the bicep of his right arm, to hide the second, larger lesion.’

‘He was now developing the first symptoms of ARC, AIDS-Related Complex,’ says B. ‘In the autumn of 1985, he gave in and agreed to take a test, the result of which was negative. Unfortunately, it would prove to be a false negative. How that could possibly have happened remains a mystery.

Freddie making his last public appearance at the Brit Awards in 1990

‘I suspect he didn’t do another test when the first came back negative, despite feeling sure that he must be positive, because part of him remained hopeful that he was really negative.

‘He was hoping against hope that all the illnesses and infections he was contracting were due to his excessive consumption of class-A drugs, mainly cocaine but also poppers [muscle relaxants] and alcohol, down the years.’

In spring 1986, Winnie Kirchberger in Munich received confirmation of his own positive status. He informed Freddie directly, at the same time ending their relationship.

That August, Freddie moved permanently into Garden Lodge, the Neo-Georgian house in Kensington which he and Mary had bought with a view to having a family there one day.

As he came to accept that his days of casual sex were over, Irish barber Jim Hutton, who he had been seeing since the summer of 1985, came into his own.

Three years after Freddie’s death, Jim would publish a best-selling memoir which exaggerated their relationship beyond satire. But in his diaries Freddie describes bluntly how he used Jim, first to make Winnie jealous and then to meet his physical needs after AIDS made having multiple partners a death sentence and Freddie could no longer gad about.

The regrettable aspect of this scenario is that Jim’s role was never spelled out to him. Freddie must have known that Jim would find such a set-up unacceptable and that, had he been enlightened, he would probably have made himself scarce.

By the end of 1986, both Tony Bastin and another of Freddie’s lovers, airline steward John Murphy, were dead. Freddie saw the writing on the wall.

In spring 1987, Freddie had tested positive for HIV and the thing that really destabilised and destroyed him, his daughter reveals, was that his most precious dream of having children with Mary was now gone.

‘He would never be able to create his own family, see his children grow up, or build the unconditional love and bond with them that he needed so much.

‘Yes, he had me. But he wanted more, and to live with his wife and children all the time, not just visit them. He was, at his heart, completely family-oriented.’

Another blow came that May when the first of a series of articles by his former manager Paul Prenter appeared in The Sun newspaper under the banner headline: ‘All the Queen’s Men’. Exposing Freddie’s booze-and-drug-fuelled gay lifestyle, which they disclosed with photographs and the identity of several of his male lovers.

B, who was then ten years old, found a copy of the newspaper at home and read it. ‘The next time I saw my dad, we sat and had a long discussion about it.

‘As always, he was open and honest. He taught me about AIDS, explaining that it is communicable only in particular situations.

‘He also told me, in an age-appropriate manner, about the article, his sexuality, his partners, the newspapers, and about how a certain kind of press was not reliable. By the end of that discussion, a big part of me had left childhood behind, I think.

‘Years later, when I came to read his notebooks, I discovered that he had been very troubled by our conversation that day.

‘He was extremely worried about the effect the bad press was having on me – more worried than I’d been myself at the time, because I was only a little girl.

‘Now that I had grown up, and he was no longer here to protect me from such things the way he had been when I was a child, the impact of what I read had far greater significance.’

Having called time on his promiscuity, and limited himself to safe sex with Jim Hutton, Freddie found himself completely uninterested in the physical side of things with him, which contributed to their deteriorating relationship.

The Bohemian Rhapsody movie states, in a title card at the end, that Freddie remained friends with Mary and continued in a relationship with Jim until his death. But Freddie wrote that he and Mary never ended their partnership. They remained each other’s significant other until the day Freddie died.

Queen in Germany in 1984. Three years later, Freddie tested positive for HIV

Snap taken during the filming of the video to It’s A Hard Life in Munich, Germany in 1984. Freddie is pictured with Barbara Valentin (left)

As for Jim, the ‘titillation’ that he and Freddie were limited to – as his illness progressed – was not enough for him and so he continued to frequent bars and clubs where he would pick up other men. There were times when he would not return to Garden Lodge until dawn.

‘Not only that, but by then, Freddie and Mary were hardly ever spending the night together either,’ says B.

‘Freddie hated the thought that Jim was out cheating on him and leaving him all alone. The relationship soon disintegrated into the usual endless rows, infidelities, jealousy, violence and abuse.

‘In 1989, Freddie ended it and asked Jim to leave.

‘But Jim knew all about Freddie’s health condition. What was to stop him going to the papers? So he changed his mind.

‘Jim moved into a small bedroom at Garden Lodge, not the larger guest suite that he claimed to have taken. And there, he remained.’

Unlike Jim, one former lover Freddie could always rely on was Joe Fanelli, with whom he had been in a two-year relationship at the end of the 1970s.

He had since made his way back to England from the US and moved into Garden Lodge as Freddie’s chef and main personal assistant. He would die a little over 18 months after Freddie, apparently of an AIDS-related brain seizure.

‘He was only 39, way too young,’ says B. ‘You know, he was one of the few who knew about me. Freddie trusted him even with that. And he used to make me the most delicious pancakes whenever I had to wait around for Freddie.’

As the end came ever closer, Freddie broke the news of his illness to his daughter, who was then 13 and had noticed that her father had lost a great deal of weight and that his skin and hair had changed.

‘Sometimes, when he laughed, a shadow would appear in his eyes. Just for a split second, and I had no idea what it could mean.

‘There was also an aura of melancholy around him that was quite unsettling.

‘I knew that something was going on, but I didn’t know what. No one said anything to me, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.’

Queen in concert at the Lewisham Odeon, south-east London, just before Christmas 1979

‘At only 45 my dad was a geriatric. His condition got worse, until he could no longer bring himself to look in the mirror.

‘He could work for only a few hours each day before becoming overwhelmed with tiredness. He made himself take long siestas, believing that they would revive him. But the more he rested, the more exhausted he became.

‘I will never forget the spring day in 1990 when he told me to my face that he was very ill.

‘I will never forget his voice, nor the way he looked. He wore a strange expression, one that I’d never seen before.

‘Nor will I forget the day, 15 months later, when he told me that he was dying. The state of the sky, the weather, the colours and sounds of nature, every detail about that day is imprinted in my memory.

‘I can’t watch the last videos: his last with Queen, the final home footage of just the two of us together. Nor can I look at the very last photographs. He had changed so much physically that he doesn’t look like Dad in them.

‘The one thing that had not yet changed about him was the intensity of his gaze. Despite his extreme thinness, the huge Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his forehead, cheek and lower lip, and despite the horrendous fatigue, the incredible power of that stare had not diminished, at least not the last time I saw him.

‘That was such a relief to me. Freddie had always communicated as much with his eyes and gestures as he had with his voice. His eyes were one of the last things he had left. But it wasn’t to last, as he began to lose his sight over the final days.

‘It was a few days after the second conversation that he gave me the notebooks. I realised only much later that he had been preparing me slowly for this outcome. Three months after that, he finally admitted to me that he had AIDS. Four weeks later, he was gone.’

His funeral service was held at West London Crematorium in Kensal Green on November 27, 1991, three days after his death.

It was attended by his family and around 35 close friends, including Elton John and Freddie’s Queen bandmates.

His daughter did not attend. ‘He didn’t want me to,’ she says.

‘He had his reasons, and I maintain that he was right. If he had wanted me to attend, I would have done so.

‘Anyone who might criticise me should remember that I was still a child, and that I didn’t need to go to his funeral to say goodbye.

‘Because Dad and I never said “Goodbye” to each other. Not just because he couldn’t stand goodbyes, but because he never said it. Not to me.

‘That the last activity in life that brought him pleasure was the buying of presents to please us all in his absence is utterly heartbreaking to me. I received gifts from him for years after his death: not only for Christmas and birthdays, but for my final university exams too.

‘All that giving was very Freddie. But I don’t think he can have anticipated how painful for us the receiving would be.’

‘I have always felt his absence but I also feel his presence. A few years ago, while undergoing minor surgery under mild general anaesthesia, I suddenly remembered a very happy moment with him. The feeling was sublime.

‘The odd thing was that the anaesthetist had difficulty waking me up after the surgery, even though the dose was very low. They couldn’t understand what had happened. It might sound ridiculous, but I like to think that maybe I was somehow with him again, if only for a little moment.’

Mary’s lovers and Mercury’s jealousy 

While Mary was relaxed about Freddie’s male lovers, he found it difficult to see her with other men.

In 1981, she began a relationship with bassist Jo Burt who played with both Tom Robinson and Black Sabbath. 

It looked set to last and the idea that another man could give Mary what she wanted really scared him.

‘It wasn’t that their bond had stopped growing, more that Freddie was a highly sensitive man,’ says B.

Mary Austin celebrating Freddy’s 38th birthday after his Wembley Arena concert

Mary and Jo were together for four years and it was Freddie, B reveals, who engineered their eventual separation: ‘Because he was jealous! He was terrified of losing his Mary.

‘He invited Jo to play on his only solo studio album, Mr Bad Guy, released in 1985, which he saw as a means via which he could control the situation. But a row that broke out between Freddie and Jo one day led to the cooling of the relationship between Mary and Jo. In the end, it killed it completely.’

After his AIDS diagnosis, not wanting to deprive Mary of the opportunity to become a mother, he encouraged her to find someone else. But none of that changed the way they felt about each other.

When interior designer, painter and decorator Piers Cameron started work at the Garden Lodge Mews, he and Mary started dating and became a couple.

At one point he moved his suitcases into what had been Freddie and Mary’s private love-nest in Phillimore Gardens, not far from Garden Lodge. Freddie approved, and their first child was soon conceived.

But Cameron had always felt overshadowed by Freddie, B reveals. He left Phillimore Gardens shortly before his and Mary’s second son, Jamie, was born.

How Freddie found a kindred spirit in opera legend 

B described opera singer Montserrat Caballé as ‘the musical love of his [Freddy’s]  life’

Second only to Mary, the band was Freddie’s family. As roadie Crystal Taylor said: ‘They were always a unit, heaven forbid an outsider said anything about the family.

‘Just like a marriage, a few squabbles during the day but then a f***ing good time at night.’

But his longstanding bandmates were not the first to be informed of Freddie’s grave health status. The first person outside his inner circle was opera singer Montserrat Caballé, pictured, described by B as ‘the musical love of his life’.

When Queen’s 1986 Magic tour reached Barcelona, Freddie mentioned during a Spanish television interview how much he admired the city’s most famous daughter. Shortly afterwards, Montserrat was invited to record a signature piece for the 1992 Olympic Games, to be hosted by Spain.

‘Her brother Carlos, who was also her manager, suggested that Montsy should work with Freddie,’ says B.

‘It was a long-cherished dream of his to sing with her and before they came face to face for the first time, Freddie was, he said, as nervous, frightened, scared and panicked as it was possible to be.

‘Within moments, she had made him feel completely at ease and he adapted to her: imagine! This was not the way he did things, yet he yielded willingly to the grande dame.’

Out of their first meetings arose the decision to record a whole album together rather than just a single and it was during their sessions together in that spring of 1987 that Freddie’s GP relayed to Mary the news that he had tested HIV positive.

‘She conveyed it directly to Freddie,’ says B. ‘As he and Montsy were working closely together at the time on the album, Freddie felt it was his duty to inform her personally.’

She, in turn, confided in him about the brain tumour she had been dealing with privately for several years. Their mortality, Freddie thought, brought them even closer together. Each said that they loved the other very much.

To the best of his daughter’s knowledge, Montserrat Caballé was the only artist in whom Freddie confided openly that he had a child.

‘After he died, she wrote me a very heartfelt letter. At no point in the letter does she talk about Freddie the artist, the music they made together, or what more they might have achieved. In a simple and loving note, she talks only about Freddie the man and Freddie the dad. Such sensitivity and kindness are very rare.’

• Adapted from Love, Freddie by Lesley-Ann Jones (Whitefox, £22.99), to be published September 5. © Lesley-Ann Jones 2025. To order a copy go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
• Freddie Mercury: A Secret Daughter – Watch/stream on 5 from 9pm Saturday, September 6.