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Here you can read the article about Freddie Mercury and late Barbara Valentin, the German actress who acted also in Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies (also in the critical acclaimed movie “Angst Essen Seele Auf”/ “Fear Eats Soul”). Freddie has met her in the 80s. It is from the DAILY MIRROR, date is sadly unknown to me, but it is probably some time after 1991 – source: I purchased it at EBAY.

I PERSONALLY am in doubt about the article, because it is taken from a tabloid paper – so it sounds sensational, at times vulgar and too dramatised rather than being serious. It is very likely that some of the stories were extra invented to make the whole story more “piquant”. Sadly, this is the only article I found with Barbara Valentin speaking. So this is rather a DOCUMENT and maybe a source for further investigations.

I underlined the information which I personally find interesting or revealing.

Freddie and Barbara Valentin:

Young Barbara Valentin:

THE DAILY MIRROR

He liked his men as ‘rough trade’ but there was another unknown side

FREDDIE’S SECRET LOVER

BIG, BUSTY…THE GERMAN BARDOT!

· HE SAID he was a messenger from the gods and called himself Mercury. Outrageous, strutting and rock’s supreme showman.

· He lived and died without public regret or excuse. But there was another Freddie Mercury. Now, with the help of friends and colleagues, the Daily Mirror pop columnist RICK SKY reveals the man behind the many-splendoured masks.

· His book, The Show Must Go On, is a fascinating portrait of the king of Queen. A star who knew what it was to live in the limelight, and how hard it would be to die in it. Here is the inside story of a legend.

HE LAY beneath white satin sheets in his king-size canopied bed. The Persian cats he cradled a few hours before had slunk sadly away. Gone too were the last of his friends.

His brown eyes saw only a mist flooding the huge third-floor bedroom of his palatial Kensington mansion.

At 7pm on that bitter evening of Sunday November 24, Freddie Mercury succumbed to AIDS.

It was the lonely end of an intensely private man. A showman to the world. A shrunken shadow in death.

For the last two days before he died he could not eat, could barely speak or see. Freddie Mercury’s life was already enclosed by memories.

Memories. Regrets. Unfulfilled dreams.

Like the dream he had of spending his life with one special person.

It never happened. In reality; Freddie’s romantic longing for a stable relationship was too often swamped by lust. As a rock star he was spoilt for sex. “I’ll go to bed with anything,” he admitted.

And though many have said his craving was fired by a fear of loneliness, Mercury spoke a simpler truth: “I want to eat my cake and eat it too.”

“HAPPINESS,” he once told me, “I haven’t got that.”

“I have thousands of friends. But you can seem to have everything and yet have nothing. Maybe one day I will catch up with myself and that will be my downfall”

He had “converted” to homosexuality at the age of 25. But he told friends he had his first homosexual relationships in his boarding school in India at the age of 14. [Some sources even claim that Freddie was sexually abused with 13- both are RUMOURS and I don’t know if it is true and furthermore this is very private – Daria K.]

“Men would make a beeline for him whenever he entered a club,” says Barbara Valentin, 50, the German actress who became one of his closest friends. Freddie’s idea of a dream date was someone who looked like actor Burt Reynolds.

A homosexual bar in Munich brought Mercury and Barbara together. Like Mary Austin, the delicate blonde who befriended him for 20 years, three-times wed Barbara was a special woman in his life.

That first meeting resulted in Mercury accompanying the buxom actress to the ladies toilet where they chatted – Barbara sitting on the toilet seat and Mercury crouched on the floor with a glass of vodka.

They stayed there talking until the cleaning lady arrived the next morning. It was the beginning of a deep friendship. “He was gay and I liked men,” says Barbara, “but we were in love.” They bought a flat together and were strangely inseparable. “See that big titted girl?” Freddie once told me. “That’s Barbara. She was once the Brigitte Bardot of Germany. She’s such a laugh.”

IF MARY Austin was shy and retiring, Barbara was just the opposite.

She and Freddie would cruise the bars together. Sometimes Barbara, Freddie and a boyfriend would end up in bed together while at other times each would get jealous of the men the other was attracting.

Once Mercury hit a man he felt was paying her too much attention.

“Another time I was flirting with someone and Freddie slapped me. But to me that slap was like a bunch of roses.”

“Yes, it was strange and different. But then our relationship was hard to understand.”

Barbara believes that despite the men in Freddie’s life, the love they shared was deeper than any of his dalliances.

“I was never jealous of his affairs as such,” she once told German magazine Bunte. “I always spent much longer with him that with anyone else.”

She used to scold him for his liking of “rough trade” – what she called “those dumb, big-handed, big-faced, lorry driver types.”

“He respected me for it. ‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘without you I would go to the dogs’”

“But there was a Jekyll and Hyde quality to him. Sometimes he would fly into a rage and throw his beautiful furniture around. In an hour it would all be forgotten and he’d be planting a rose with his delicate, womanly fingers.”

“Once I found him in a kind of trance, beating his head against a radiator till both were covered with blood.”

Another time Barbara had to be rescued by her assistant when he began to strangle her in his sleep. “Freddie had no idea he was doing these things. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body.”

“When he was in Munich one of the cats he left behind in London died. Freddie broke down in flood of tears and flew home for its funeral.”

“And in London last summer one of his beautiful golden koi carp took ill and died. Can you imagine? Freddie started to cry.”

But life between Mercury and Barbara was never the same after he quit Munich in 1985. The city which once had held so much fun for him had lost its allure.

IN LONDON the once-flamboyant figure turned into a shrinking violet.

He had become a ghost of his former self. Like Mary Austin, his first-and-forever girlfriend, Barbara confirmed that the star was in agony and had to use painkillers. But again, he never complained.

“There were also visits to hospitals, made in the utmost secrecy. One was for a blood transfusion,” says Barbara.

“In the middle of it all we visited a church in Switzerland, where we prayed for a miracle.”

The last time Barbara saw him he was lying thin and gaunt on his bed. She left the house in tears.

A few weeks later she sent him a key, made from 18-carat gold. It was the one to the flat they once shared.

A key to past he would never be able to revisit.