FREDDIE’S GIRL WRITES SCREENPLAY

FREDDIE MERCURY’S first love is penning a screenplay in memory of their two-year passionate heterosexual affair before he became Queen’s fabulously flamboyant gay frontman. Rosemary Pearson met the future superstar, real name Farrokh, but who was then known as Frederick Bulsara, when they were humble art students at a West London college in the late Sixties.

Now, almost 35 years after their heart-wrenching split, she is ready to shed light on a little known time in the life of the singer, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1991.

“Reading Freddie’s biography rekindled my interest in a period of my life that I’d shut away for years,” says the retired art teacher, now known as Rose Rose.

“I saw a gaping hole in his history that no one but me could write about,” she adds. Rose has confessed to being “passionately in love” with Mercury, then in his early 20s, and that he was a “marvellous lover”.

She recalls: “I didn’t think he was gay at all. He was playing around wit the idea. He wanted to adopt a gay persona because he thought it was more appealing, more exciting. He absolutely adored women.”

She claims she was forced to end the relationship when Freddie became infatuated with her friend, Derek Jarman, the gay film director.

“I loved Freddie but our situation became unbearable. He was obsessed with the idea of sleeping with a man and was besotted with Derek, someone he’d never even met.”

But Rose’s real heartbreak came later when she discovered that Freddie had fallen for another woman, Mary Austin, who remained Freddie’s best friend until his death and to whom he bequeathed his multi-million pound fortune. His later years were, however, largely devoted to gay relationships.

Rose says: “For years I found it difficult to think about him – giving up on someone you love is not an easy thing to do – but this project has given me the chance to revisit some intensely painful memories with some degree of objectivity.”

The unfinished script takes the form of eight remembered conversations with Freddie, on “music, life and his aspirations”.

But questions surrounding Mercury’s sexuality are likely to remain central to the plot.