Freddie Mercury’s sister reportedly spent £3,000,000 to secure his belongings that were put up for auction by his ex.
After being diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, the lead singer of rock band Queen died from complications from the disease aged 45 in 1991.
In the early 1970s Mercury – born Farrokh Bulsara – had a long-term relationship with Mary Austin, whom he’d met a year before the band formed.
The couple lived together for several years however split after he came out as gay.
But they remained friends until his death. In his will Mercury left his London home to Austin after telling her: ‘You would have been my wife, and it would have been yours anyway.’
In 2023 Austin sold a selection of Mercury’s items, part of the Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own auction by Sotheby’s.
More than 140,000 visitors attended a pre-sales exhibition, with 41,800 bids across six sessions and buyers from more than 50 different countries.
At the time Austin said she needed to ‘put my affairs in order’, eventually selling 1,406 lots for a total of £40million.
However, it’s now emerged Mercury’s sister Kashmira Bulsara spent millions trying to secure some of her brother’s belongings.
She is said to have been devastated seeing the items up for sale and was prepared to pay over the odds to keep them in the family.
However, The Sun has reported Bulsara didn’t want Austin to know she was bidding, doing so anonymously with her son Jamal Zook.
‘Kashmira was angry and upset to see so many of her beloved brother’s possessions become available for anyone to buy,’ a source told the publication.
‘So she went for a private viewing, anonymously, with Jamal and her PA before the auction to see which bits she wanted to try to get.
‘Then when it came to auction time, Kashmira’s PA went in-person to Sotheby’s and was on the phone to Kashmira throughout. Kashmira watched online and told her PA how much to bid for each item.’
‘They had set aside a huge budget so were actually very happy with the final figure laid out, despite paying well over the estimated price for each one,’ they added.
The source went on to share while Mercury’s sister appreciated how adored he was around the world, she was ‘saddened to think of some of his sentimental belongings not being with his loved ones’.
Some of the items the 73-year-old snapped up included a Wurlitzer Model 850 jukebox for £406,400, and a waistcoat with portraits of Freddie’s six cats on which went for £139,700.
A military-style jacket made for his 39th birthday was her most expensive purchase, at £457,200.
She also purchased eight pages of draft lyrics of Queen’s 1974 hit Killer Queen for £279,400.
After the auction, Austin also donated some of the proceeds to the Mercury Phoenix Trust — an Aids charity set up by Freddie’s Queen bandmates and their manager Jim Beach — and the Elton John Aids Foundation.
‘The time has come for me to take the difficult decision to close this very special chapter in my life,’ she said.
‘I decided that it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to keep things back. If I was going to sell, I had to be brave and sell the lot.’
Before his death, Mercury would refer to Austin as ‘the love of his life’, once calling her his only true friend.
In a 1985 interview, he said: ‘All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible. The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other; that’s enough for me.’
Queen’s 1975 song Love Of My Life was written by Mercury as a tribute to Austin, who also helped care for him during his illness.
He left her half of his estate in his will, as well as his Garden Lodge mansion in Kensington, West London – which she put on the market last year for £30million.
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