Andrew Ridgeley

Origins and early life

Andrew Ridgeley was born on 26 January 1963 in Windlesham, in Surrey.

Work and career

He has told his own origins to the Jewish Chronicle, and this fiche repeats them: his father, Alberto Mario Zacharia, was a Jew of Italian, Yemeni and Egyptian descent who fled Egypt at the Suez crisis of 1956 and, settling in England, changed the family name to Ridgeley — after a street sign, seen by chance; his mother, Jennifer Dunlop, had English and Scottish roots. He figures in this directory by that documented Jewish father, and he says his father did him a favor with the new name, which spared him what his father had known.

At Bushey Meads School he befriended a boy named Georgios Panayiotou, and in 1982 the two of them, as Wham!, became one of the defining pop acts of the decade — Wham Rap!, Club Tropicana, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Last Christmas, the first Western pop group to play in China in 1985 — before George Michael's solo career and the band's farewell at Wembley in 1986. Ridgeley later withdrew to Cornwall, raced cars, and in 2019 published his memoir of the Wham! years.