George Michael thought to have been battling drug addiction in the lead up to his death.

As authorities await the result of a post-mortem, speculation about the cause of pop icon George Michael’s ‘peaceful’ Christmas Day death continues to play out in the headlines.

While the official line from British authorities remains ‘unexplained but not suspicious’, his longtime manager yesterday cited heart failure – a revelation that’s fuelled discussion about the role the 53-year-old’s famously hedonistic lifestyle may have played in his final days.

The UK’s Daily Telegraph, for example, is claiming that the star was thought to be battling a “spiralling heroin addiction” for the past year or so, which – according to their source – saw him hospitalised.

“He’s been rushed to A&E on several occasions. He used heroin,” the source reportedly said.

“I think it’s amazing he’s lasted as long as he has.”

The former Wham! singer’s drug use has attracted headlines many times throughout his illustrious four-decade career.

In October 2006, he was found slumped behind the wheel of his car, and subsequently pleaded guilty to ‘driving while unfit through drugs’.

Just two years later he was cautioned for possession of Class A drugs, then was slapped with an eight-week prison sentence and five-year driving ban in 2010 after crashing his car into a London shop while under the influence of drugs and in possession of cannabis.

Michael was quite open about his drug use, in 2007 telling BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, that he smoked too much marijuana.

He also told the programme that he’d identified the root of such “self-destructive” behaviour: a belief that his talent would never let him down.

“In a strange way I’ve spent the last 15 or 20 years trying to derail my own career because it never seems to suffer,” he said. “I suffered terrible things – bereavements and public humiliations – but my career just seems to right itself like a plastic duck in a bath and, in some ways, I resent that.”