Blu-ray, DVD Release: Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Sept. 25, 2012
Price: DVD $14.99, Blu-ray $19.98
Studio: Eagle Rock


Freddie Mercury:  The Great Pretender offers a music-filled documentary of the late co-founder and lead singer of the rock band Queen.

Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender sceneProduced and directed by Rhys Thomas, life-long Queen fan and expert and the man behind the acclaimed Queen: Days of Our Lives BBC documentary, Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender goes way back to reveal more than ever before the inside story of Freddie’s life and career and the solo projects he worked on outside of Queen.

The extensive archive footage is drawn from rare interviews with Freddie, concerts, video shoots and personal material, much of it being seen for the first time, along with newly filmed contributions from fellow Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor, Queen manager Jim Beach, soprano Montserrat Caballé, composers David Arnold and Mike Moran, lyricist Tim Rice, comedian and lifelong fan Matt Lucas and many more.

Among the goodies in the doc are a rare clip of Freddie and Rod Stewart singing their demo for “Take Another Piece of My Heart,” an unreleased song from 1984, a snippet of the unreleased Michael Jackson/Freddie Mercury collaboration “There Must Be More To Life Than This,” and complete footage of Freddie with the Royal Ballet in 1979.

Rhys also found 10 cans of movies taken at Freddie’s 39th “Black and White” birthday party in Mrs. Henderson’s nightclub in Munich in 1985. It was originally filmed for the video for “Living On My Own,” and reportedly banned by Freddie’s record company because of its cross-dressing theme.

As bonus features (that will not be part of the version to be broadcast by the BBC) the program includes “Freddie Mercury Goes Solo” and an extended interview with Montserrat Caballé.

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.