That buzz turned out to be justified as Malek did in fact take home the Best Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards in 2019. Before he died he said, “I’ve left you the house because you would have been the woman I would have married, and by rights this would all have been yours anyway,”’ Austin says. ‘What do you say? Well, OK…’

Brian May, speaking remarkably candidly, noted: “Youʼre universally adored and loved. But then youʼre surrounded by people who love you, and yet youʼre utterly lonely. You get to a place which is hard to really recover from, and Iʼm conscious that I never have really recovered. Itʼs like you never grow up. Weʼve all suffered. I know definitely we have. Freddie, obviously, went completely AWOL, which is why he got that terrible disease. He wasnʼt a bad person, but he was utterly out of control for a while. In a way, all of us were out of control and – perhaps I shouldnʼt be speaking for Roger and John, but I think underneath it they would agree with me – it screwed us up.” They met through friends. She was an 18-year-old sales assistant at Biba, the fashionable Kensington boutique. He was 23, an art school graduate – Freddie Bulsara then – running a clothes and textile stall in Kensington Market, about to reinvent himself as the lead singer for a group called Smile that would later become known as Queen.Everyone,” according to Freddie at the time, “is very highly strung.” The singer even more so. “Iʼm very emotional,” he said. “Whereas before, I was given time to make my decisions, now nearly all of us are so highly strung we just snap. We always argue, but I think itʼs a healthy sign, because we get to the root of the matter and squeeze the best out. But lately so much is happening, itʼs escalating so fast that everybody wants to know almost instantly, and I certainly get very temperamental.” A few weeks later I met Austin again, in a conference room at Sotheby’s Bond Street auction room. She is a slightly built woman with a serene and thoughtful manner, who speaks in a quiet, hesitant voice. But Mercury seemed deeply ambiguous about the band and its future. The Works album had proved that Queen were a rare quartet, one in which each member had proved to be capable of writing hit tunes. The studio, he admitted, was the source of of some frustration. On arriving at the Vauxhall Tavern, she wrote: “The place was full. It took an absolute aeon to edge our way to the bar, with person after person cheerfully greeting us. It was fabulously outrageous and so bizarrely exciting. Our hearts pounded with every new leather-clad hairy body that approached, but no one, absolutely no one, recognised Diana.

So I did my studies, finished school, got my O Levels, got my A levels. I went to Imperial College, did three years and got a BSc Honours in physics, which had a fair bit of astronomy in it, and then I did four years post-graduate for the PhD in astronomy, but I never finished writing the thing up. I published a couple of papers with my supervisor, but thatʼs where I left it. And I donʼt regret leaving it. It was the right time.” From the touching account of Freddie Mercuryʼs last years that Jim Hutton gave in his book Freddie And Me, Mercuryʼs retreat behind the walls of Garden Lodge with a small group of friends and his “old faithful” Mary Austin was at the very least a contented time. Mercury quietly resigned himself to his fate, and lived his last years with dignity.

Ms Rocos says she attended the famous LGBTQ+ bar with Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury and comedian Kenny Everett. She wrote that after drinking together at Kenny Everett’s house in London, the four wanted to go out to a bar.

Freddie Mercury performing on stage in front of the 120,000 strong crowd at Knebworth Park August 9, 1986.For more than 30 years, she says, the house has been ‘the most glorious memory box, because it has such love and warmth.