Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin met through his Queen bandmate Brian May when he was 24 and she was just 19. After some time getting to know each other, they began dating and it soon became apparent how deep their connection was. The pair quickly moved in together and spent the next six years as a couple, with the Bohemian Rhapsody singer coming to rely on Austin as one of his closest confidantes.
However, around four years into their relationship, Austin started to sense something had changed in Mercury.
In a newly unearthed interview, which she gave as part of the 2000 documentary, Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, Austin revealed: “I knew that this man wasn’t at one with himself over something.
“I could see that he was feeling bad about something, wasn’t feeling comfortable, avoiding situations, which wasn’t Freddie,” she explained. “These things weren’t the person that I first met.”
After a six-year romance, the Queen legend came out and told Austin he was bisexual.
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After that conversation, she said, he was a totally different person.
“It was a relief, really, to actually hear it from him,” she said. “To have surmised that was the problem probably for the last two years of the six years we were together, to know that I had more or less guessed right.
“I felt a huge burden lifted. I enjoyed the fact that he was able to be honest and frank with me.
“But certainly, once that had been discussed, he was a different person,” she continued. “He was like the person I’d known in the early years. He was more at one with himself.”
“There’s a great, almost euphoric feeling that you are witnessing the development. He gave so much so, how could you not give?”
After Mercury came out to her, Austin decided to move out of the house they share and end their romantic relationship.
They remained close friends, however, with the singer’s record label buying her a home nearby.
They maintained a strong bond for the rest of his life, up until his tragic death in 1991, and he left the majority of his fortune to her.
Mercury spent the last six years of his life in a relationship with boyfriend Jim Hutton.
Both Hutton and Austin were among the small circle of friends who cared for him in his final weeks, which were spent at his West Kensington mansion One Garden Lodge.
The Queen frontman was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and became increasingly ill in the years which followed.
In late 1991, he decided to stop taking medication for his illness and died of bronchopneumonia, a complication due to AIDS, shortly afterwards.