Elton John at 75: photos of his tumultuous life

With a career of more than 60 years, some 30 studio albums, more than 300 million copies sold worldwide, many number ones, more than 4,000 concerts, countless awards and recognitions, the successes of Elton John are any musician's dream.

On the personal side, however, the life of the British artist (born in the UK on March 25, 1974) has been very hard. We got a glimpse of his life's challenges in the 2020 biopic 'Rocketman'.

Before the age of 4, Reginald Kenneth Dwight - as was his birthname - could play songs from the radio by ear. Thanks to his talent, he got a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

The young Reggie Dwight's music endeavors were modest, though. At the age of 15 he worked in a hotel bar and played songs that the customers asked for. From the tips he bought an electric piano.

Reggie was encouraged to devote himself to music by his grandmother and his mother, Sheila Eileen. They were his great supporters in his early days.

The young Elton John suffered from the lack of affection from his father, the Royal Air Force veteran Stanley Dwight. In The Guardian, the singer recounted how much his parents' relationship pressed on his childhood.

"My dad was strict and distant and had a terrible temper; my mother was argumentative and prone to dark moods. When they were together, all I can remember is icy silences or screaming. The fights were usually about me, about how I was being raised."

(Quote from The Guardian)

The way young Reginald had to escape from that situation was to lock himself in his room with his record and comic book collection, letting himself go into an imaginary world and fantasizing that he was Little Richard, Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis.

Throughout his life, Elton's relationship with his father was strained. "He never told me he loved me, he never hugged me and he never came to see me perform. He had been taught that love had limits, that you didn't have to show it in public. Not even in private," the artist once told students at Oxford University about his father.

His parents divorced when he was 13 and they both rebuilt their lives. His mother Sheila married interior decorator Fred Farebrother and his father a lab technician named Edna. With her he had two children.

One of his half-brothers, Geoff Dwight, was particularly upset by the image of his father in 'Rocketman'. "It's true that he was a product of his time, a time when men didn't constantly embrace each other or express their feelings, but he always showed us a lot of affection," he told The Daily Mail.

During the last years of his mother's life, Elton John stayed away from her. The reason? As Sheila Farebrother told The Daily Mail in 2015, her son did not want her to be in touch with two of his former collaborators: Bob Halley, his driver and personal assistant, and John Reid, his manager and former lover. She had refused to grant his wish.

Sheila had always had a good relation with the two former friends of her son. In Bob's case, she considered him as one of her own. Elton John was especially hurt when she told him that. They went seven years without speaking to each other.

Reconciliation came in 2017. However, eight months later Sheila passed away, leaving no time for the two of them to compensate for the lost time.

(In the photo, the singer greets Princes Harry and William during a concert in honor of Princess Diana, who was a personal friend of his.)

In the same year as his mother's death, Elton John came close to dying himself. He had prostate cancer, which to his luck was discovered during a routine check-up.

The singer was operated for the cancer and the surgery was a success, but he contracted an infection from which he almost died. "I was up all night, wondering if I was going to die", the singer recounts in his autobiography 'I: Elton John' (2019).

"The doctors told [my partner] David I had 24 hours to live," Elton John writes. "If the South American tour had lasted another day, I would have been dead." After almost two weeks in the hospital, the singer was discharged and spent nearly two months recovering at home.

Although he is now a strong standard-bearer for the LGTB collective, he was not always able to show himself as he really felt. Elton John declared himself a bisexual in 1976 in 'Rolling Stone' and even married Renate Blauel, a recording engineer, on February 14, 1984.

In 1988, after divorcing Blauel, he revealed in 'Rolling Stone' that he was actually gay.

"I wanted to be a good husband above all things, but by denying who I really was, I caused my wife sadness and myself enormous guilt and regret," the star wrote on Instagram some time ago.

Elton John is also a frontrunner in the fight against HIV. Every year at the end of the Oscar gala he gives a famous party to raise funds for this cause. Not surprisingly, John lost many friends to AIDS.

The repression of his sexual impulses led to the singer being immersed in toxic relationships during his younger years. These were characterized by lust, drugs, alcohol and eating disorders.

According to his former manager and lover, John Reid (left in the photo), Elton John had never had a true sexual adolescence, so as a 20-something he wanted to live it all at once.

To talk about Elton John is to talk about wigs, sequins and extravagant looks, but in reality these were all attempts for him to run away from himself. The young star was not really happy and did not like himself.

All this led him, in 1975, at the height of his success, and in the middle of a party at his home, to attempt to take his own life. Many relatives and friends were there, and it was a wake-up call for them as well as for Elton John himself.

"It was the stress," he later recalled. "I hadn't stopped working for five years." Elton reflected on the fateful day in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2010.

For many years, Elton John was addicted to several substances. As he jokingly told Neon magazine, he often thinks of his abuse when he flies over the Alps. Looking at all the snow on the mountain tops, he likes to think he probably inhaled the same amount of prohibited substances in his life.

"I didn't consider myself a drug addict," he said in the program 'Life Stories'. "I thought those were the ones sticking needles in their arm, but I was actually the biggest junkie. I came very close to dying."

In 1990, Elton John had himself admitted in a rehabilitation clinic to get rid of his drug and alcohol addictions and return to the scene absolutely renewed. Since then, he has been sober.

In recent years, the singer has become more of a family man. Elton John and his partner David Furnish got married in 2014 after a 20-year relationship.

With his husband David he has two children: Zachary (2010) and Elijah (2013). They were born of a surrogate mother.

Elton John confessed in his autobiography that he did not want to be a father at first. He felt he looked too old and spent too much time on tour to raise children.

After meeting two children from an orphanage in Ukraine, however, he changed his mind completely. He and David tried to adopt these two brothers from their Ukrainian orphanage. It was a special home for HIV-positive children. However, Ukrainian law did not allow gay couples to adopt children, nor could any couple over 45 years file for adoption.

(Pictured is David Furnisk with a child from an orphanage in Ukraine)

In 2018, Elton John began his very last tour: the 'Farewell Yellow Brick Road.' It was a three-year tour to review his greatest hits, and it was to end in 2020 on five continents.

Of the 350 concerts, some have had to be postponed. At first, the singer suffered from pneumonia. And then, like all of us, he got overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2021, Elton John scored a giant hit with British superstar Dua Lipa, mixing a few of his most famous songs into the duet 'Cold Heart.'

As we can see, Elton John is "still standing," and he will make sure to retire with a bang.