Wow!
She wound up with half of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s estate, and now Mary Austin is getting a £187.5 million windfall thanks to a record-breaking £1 billion deal that Freedie’s former bandmates landed to sell their catalog to Sony music.
The lucky hits have built up for Mary Austin over time. When Freddie Mercury died, the two were engaged to be married, and his will specified that she would receive twenty-five percent of his estate. Later on, when Freddie’s parents died, Austin—who had been Freddie’s fiancee and then his longtime closest friend—found that they’d left her their portion of Freddie’s estate, leaving her with half of the pie. In the bargain, she wound up with the right to 18.75 percent of all revenues from Queen Productions, the holding company which manages the bands catalog and distributes royalties from its earnings. Surviving band members Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon also get a cut. Austin is no longer close to the other band members, although they do all see each other art trustee meetings of the charity set up in Freddie’s honor: Mercury Phoenix Trust.
With this latest boost to her bank account, Mary Austin is expected to become one of Britain’s Top 100 richest women.
Freddie and Mary first met in 1970s, when Freddie was a struggling unknown who’d stepped off the boat from Zanzibar only a few years before and Mary was an art student not yet in her twenties. The pair bonded quickly, and in 1973 they got engaged and moved in together.
However, three years later, after the pair had been together for six years, Freddie confided in her that he was bisexual, to which she replied that she disagreed, she thought he was gay. The pair hugged, and their bond continued. Freddie pledged to Mary his undying love, and Mary remained his closest confidant and lived in a flat—which Freddie provided for her–near Freddie’s home in West London.
