Pop star and musician Andrew Ridgeley – half of Wham! – has said his dad “did [him] a favour” by not giving him a Jewish surname.
Speaking on the Table Manners podcast with Jessie and Lennie Ware, he said that having the surname Ridgeley “probably benefitted [him] growing up” because it meant that they were seen as “just English”.
Ridgeley’s father – who was half-Italian and half-Yemeni, but Jewish on both sides – changed his surname from Zacharia when he fled Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956.
“He saw a road called Ridgeley Gardens and chose that as our family name,” the singer said.
Ridgeley admitted this made his life easier, telling the presenters that if your name isn’t English “you don’t know where you stand".
And this was an issue his bandmate George Michael also experienced.
“It was always a juxtaposition,” Ridgeley said of Michael. “His name and his sense of being an English kid”.
Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, his name “created some difficulties for him”, he added.
Ridgeley does feel some regret about his father's decision to Anglicise the family name: “I wish they’d kept it because I’d be the last in the [school] register,” he joked.
Wham! performing live (Photo: Express Newspapers/Getty Images)
The musician, who was born in Surrey, met his longtime collaborator George Michael when he took him under his wing at school. Wham!, the band they formed together, enjoyed worldwide success from 1982 to 1986, selling 35 million records.
Michael, who died on Christmas Day in 2016, also had Jewish roots, telling the Los Angeles Times that his maternal grandmother was Jewish.
She raised their children with no knowledge of this heritage, though. This was during the Second World War, Michael said, and “she thought if they didn’t know that their mother was Jewish, they wouldn’t be at risk”.
His mother’s time at a convent school meant Michael was not raised in the faith.
