It was pretty nearly exactly 19 years ago, and amid quite a frenzied press scrum, that I first interviewed Sharon Osbourne. Truly it was another time. The X Factor — an ITV talent competition, I explained to Times readers — was reaching the climax of its sensational first season, its cancellation a comfortable 14 years ahead. As its sole female judge at the time, Osbourne had, I wrote, spent the autumn displaying the tough love she had already advertised on The Osbournes, the mischievously edited MTV reality sitcom that had made her almost as famous as her eternally erring husband, the wobbly, bat-munching rocker Ozzy Osbourne, an unmanageable man she had already spent more than two decades managing.
Different times, I say — so different that a male journalist on a respectable paper might, without repercussions, mention a woman’s physical appearance. Osbourne, I wrote, had a beautiful face but was shaped like a pear, a tiny 5ft 2in pear.
Fast-forward nearly two decades and I am in Claridge’s in Mayfair and Osbourne, now 71, is having her picture taken. Thanks to literally cutting-edge surgery, her face, I’ll risk observing, is more dollishly pretty than ever, but her figure is no longer a pear, which just leaves the adjective “tiny”. She weighs, she will tell me, 7st. The other change is that she seems relatively subdued — even if by normal standards her conversation remains outrageous. Anyhow, a few minutes after I arrive she exits the shoot with barely a word and heads for her suite upstairs, picking up from the floor a crumpled tissue and claiming it as her own as if it were a dropped earring.
The passing decades have wrought many changes in social mores, some of which account for the most recent crisis in Osbourne’s life. In March 2021, the normally media-savvy performer was cancelled after defending her friend Piers Morgan’s Good Morning Britain outburst about the Duchess of Sussex. During an exchange on CBS’s American daytime talk show, The Talk, Osbourne, while vehemently denying racism and saying she was merely supporting free speech, told her fellow panellist Sheryl Underwood, who is black, not to cry. CBS concluded her behaviour did not “align” with its “values for a respectful workplace” and out went Osbourne after 11 years on the programme.
“It was horrendous. Bloody hell,” she says, sharing with me a small sofa in her modest suite. “It was at the time when Black Lives Matter was really, really powerful — incredibly powerful. Everybody was trying to be ‘I’m more woke than you are’, including the networks. Which I get. It’s a business.”
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She was offended to be called a racist, especially since her father, the notorious British music manager Don Arden, was Jewish and as a teenager had joined protests against the fascist leader Oswald Mosley in the East End of London. But during the controversy she received so many death threats she installed 24-hour security around the family home in Los Angeles. “They were going to cut our throats. They were going to come and cut Ozzy’s throat, my animals’, my dogs’.”
It was clear no one was going to hire her for a good while and Osbourne slipped into a deep depression. As part of her treatment she took a course of ketamine. “I had not been able to stop crying. So it calmed me down till I didn’t cry. I used to do two-hour therapy sessions three times a week and I could talk freely without getting hysterical.” After nine months the trauma left her system. “I can laugh about it now and talk about it without being upset or feeling like a victim. So they offered me up as a sacrifice for being politically incorrect. F*** it.”
And another door did open. For 20 months over here in Britain she has been performing a similar role to the one she was forced to quit, this time on Talk TV’s nightly chew-over of the news, also named The Talk. But although she has not disappeared from public view, there is, demonstrably, less of her to see, and this is due to regular injections of another drug, Ozempic, originally developed to manage blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes (the Ozempic website says that while it may help diabetics “lose some weight”, it is “not a weight-loss drug”).
“Everybody was on it and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll have a bit of that.’ And so this is the outcome,” she says. “It’s been a year in December since I started to diet and I’ve lost 42lb. I can’t seem to put weight back on, which is a luxury, but also it’s like, be careful what you wish for.”
Having stopped the injections, the woman who at her heaviest was 16st says she now fluctuates between 7st and 7st 2lb, just under the lowest figure of the normal BMI range for a woman of her height.
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Is she worried? “No, but my family are. Ozzy’s concerned because he says I look like Nancy Reagan. I’m like, ‘Oh dear.’ He gets worried because he says I don’t eat enough and my son’s worried too.”
Count me in. I’m slightly worried. Styling for her shoot began at 10am. By the time I leave her suite it is 3.45pm and she has not had anything but Coke in all that time. At the beginning of the year she fainted for 20 minutes and was taken to hospital. Perhaps she should see a doctor?
“I’m fine. My weight has yo-yo’d my entire life.”
Osbourne has known some difficult relationships in her time, beginning with the one with her father (in 2004 she told me he was a “two-bit hood” who if he wanted a coat would “call in the boys” to go to a shop and steal it). Her relationship with her own body, however, is surely the most difficult. The low point, obviously, was in 2002 when she was treated for stage 3 colon cancer and given a one-in-three chance of surviving. Yet she dealt with the cancer, the surgery and the chemotherapy with stoicism (unlike Ozzy, who hit the bottle and mentally collapsed) and indeed survived. It is her body’s self-inflicted wounds that puzzle me.
In her 2013 autobiography, Unbreakable, her third, she recorded having facelifts in 1987 and 2002. She has also had Botox, fillers, “lifts” to her legs and arms and a tummy tuck to ameliorate the after-effects of gastric-band surgery to control her weight. In addition she had breast implants, which had leaked. Taken together with a genetic test that showed she was at high risk of breast cancer, the seeping silicone persuaded her to have a double mastectomy. Her large breasts had always got on her nerves, she wrote, but “a cheeky little neck lift” gave her “the most fabulous décolletage”. Yet now, she wrote in the book, her good opinion of cosmetic surgery had changed: “Every time you go under the knife for vanity, you are slicing off yet more of your self-worth.”
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So why in 2021 did she have plastic surgery on her face? “That was the worst thing that I ever did. I looked like Cyclops. I had one eye here and one eye there and my mouth was all skewwhiff, and then I had to wait for that to heal before I could go back and have it corrected.”
But she had written she was through with all that. “And then you go, ‘One last, one last…’ ”
Why? “Vanity. Ego. ‘Oh, you look great for your age.’ ”
But most women would love to look like her. “But I know what I really look like. When I look in the mirror, I see the real me.”
She means, I think, that she never sees a beautiful face stare back at her. Where did this body dysmorphia come from? Was she not told she was beautiful when she was growing up?
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“Not really. I didn’t come from a family where they said, ‘Oh, have you seen my little princess?’ I mean, I was loved but I came from a [music] industry family. So if you could sing it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, she’s amazing.’ No. If you could sing, you had to sing brilliantly, and if you couldn’t you’d better find some other way of earning a living.”
Gosh. If my daughter holds a tune, it’s a round of applause.
“But that’s normal people.”
HER PARENTS WERE NOT NORMAL. There was her gangster father, Don, but also her mother, Hope Shaw, a former vaudeville dancer, whose coldness and depressions were possibly brought on by a car accident in which the car’s coat hook sank into her temple. In Extreme, her first, bestselling autobiography from 2005, Osbourne described “a mother who couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed to give us breakfast; a father who lied and cheated all his life”.
Ozzy’s upbringing in Birmingham, meanwhile, featured his father, John, whose factory shifts ended just as Ozzy’s mother, Lilian’s, were beginning, and five of six children sharing one bedroom. According to Ozzy’s memoirs, John’s mother was “borderline certifiable” and violent to her grandchildren, while Lilian’s sister died after jumping into a canal on the way back from a mental hospital. “My grandmother on my mother’s side was a bit Radio Rental too,” he added.
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Ozzy, nearly four years her senior, met Sharon when she was 18. He was the lead vocalist of Black Sabbath, the heavy metal band still never out-doomed or out-boomed. Arden had been their manager but his daughter took over managing Ozzy when he was fired from the group (Ozzy and Black Sabbath have had more splits and reconciliations than Ozzy and Sharon). They were married in 1982. I suggest they each may have seen something of themselves in the other: two kids with grotty childhoods — he with the piss bucket at the end of his bed, she with the family parsimonious with their affection. She agrees; although their upbringings were different, both childhoods encouraged them to be fighters.
Did he propose or did she? “He did, about six times, and I threw away the ring each time we had an argument. There’d be another engagement ring and another. We’d look through bushes, through bins, everything, to find those old rings.”
She offers a stirring portrait of the man she fell in love with. “He was so funny when he was younger, hysterical, but he was so vulnerable — terribly vulnerable and lost.” He was also, she explains, a real bloke, “crashing across fields on his dirt bike, up and down bloody hills, flying” and forever accident-prone.
This is not the 75-year-old Ozzy Osbourne of today, apart from in the accident department. In 2019 on a night-time mission to the bathroom he fell and hurt his back, weak from a quad bike accident 16 years earlier. Warning that another fall would leave him paraplegic, surgeons operated on him but only made things worse, so there were multiple operations to reverse the first.
Is he in a wheelchair now? “No, but his body is very delicate. He’s doing good. It’s just that his body is not as good as his voice and his brain right now.”
In the year of the quad bike accident he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which explained his poor balance and may be why he fell. It must be painful to see him like this. “It’s heartbreaking. But you just have to make the most of everything and it’s not like he can’t do anything. He does a lot. In the past five years he’s had two Top Five albums and won two Grammys.”
Indeed, the day after we meet, Sharon accepts on his behalf a trophy at the Rolling Stone UK Awards in London, and there are plans, she tells me, for an Ozzy Osbourne museum and music school in Birmingham. But it is not just the legend of Ozzy that is returning home. It is the frail old man himself. The Osbournes have decided to make Britain their base from next year.
Should you wish to welcome them, you can book now for Sharon Osbourne — Cut the Crap, a two-venue stage show in January in which she will be interviewed by Loose Woman and Sun columnist Jane Moore and answer questions from the audience in London and Birmingham. Osbourne, the show’s promoters say, will be covering “the anguish of a broken marriage”, drug abuse in her family, the loss of friends, betrayal by colleagues and her battles with mental health issues. Fasten your seatbelts — it should be a bumpy night or two.
They are not coming back, she insists, because she has no work in America, although since the CBS debacle she hasn’t worked there. “I’d already planted a seed that we had to get Ozzy home,” she says. “My husband was sick. Your life changes and you think, ‘OK, is this really where I want to be?’ ”
The return to their mansion, Welders House in Buckinghamshire, has been delayed until the new year to allow the completion of an extension that will house a pool in which Ozzy can exercise. The truth, however, is that builders have been in for two and a half years. “When you come back after so many years and you see the cracks in the walls, you know — the curtains are faded, all of this. And you go, ‘Oh my Lord, I can’t live here.’ ”
I think of all the descriptions in her memoirs of houses she has done up and then moved out of, and also of that Kleenex she picked up before my very eyes. I wonder whether this pursuit of perfect interiors is not displacement activity: she imposes neatness on sitting rooms because she can’t do the same to her life. “I used to think it’s going to fix everything,” she agrees. “If the house is perfect, then we’ll be perfect.’ ”
Nice homes certainly did not dissuade Ozzy from straying repeatedly. In 2012 Sharon discovered that after seven years he had fallen off the sobriety wagon and for seven months been secretly imbibing alcohol and popping pills. Furious, she moved out and demanded a divorce but of course took him back, because taking Ozzy back is her addiction.
And then in 2016, rather more surprisingly, she learnt about six years of sexual transgressions with six women including his hairstylist, a masseuse in England, a masseuse in LA, a Russian teenager and a cook. “And he had one in Brazil. He used to tour there,” she adds for the sake of completeness. Yet again, they reunited. So over 41 years of marriage she has endured his drinking, drug-taking, infidelities, lies and moroseness and also physical assaults, although her line on those is that she gave as good as she got: yes, he tried to strangle her and shook her so violently two front teeth broke off, but she took a hammer to his records. “You hurt the people you love,” she says.
Is it true Ozzy underwent therapy for sex addiction? “Oh yes. He’s been through the lot. There’s nothing he’s not addicted to. I mean, that’s his personality. He’s got this big hole that he cannot fill inside him. He was born with it.”
Do they still have a good sex life? “I can’t be arsed. Can you? It’s like, ‘Oh, do we have to? Really?’ But with Ozzy, it’s like you’ll give him a chocolate that he likes and he’ll just eat that chocolate for the next six months.”
So if Sharon is unbreakable, then Ozzy, even in his decline, is insatiable.
SHARON OSBOURNE’S LAST MEMOIR began with a flurry of self-flagellation in which she said she had, to a greater or lesser extent, “f***ed up” as a daughter, sister, wife and mother. Whether or not that last count on the charge sheet is true, her children have clearly not stopped loving her. Fifteen minutes into our interview she takes a video call from her second daughter, Kelly, now 39, in LA. She is ringing so that her mother can say good morning to her baby son, Sidney. Then midway through our 90 minutes together, Kelly’s older sister, Aimee, 40, enters the room in person and shakes my hand warily before disappearing.
Aimee is the mystery among the Osbournes since she does not give interviews. “She’s very, very different. She loves to sing. She loves to write. Does she want to be a huge star? No. She just wants to be creative and live her life.” Unlike Kelly and their brother, Jack, 38, Aimee refused to appear on The Osbournes, creating a division with her siblings that Sharon confirms has never healed.
As I told Sharon back in 2002, I am on Aimee’s side. The Osbournes was an invitation extended to the world to laugh at a family that was not even fully grown up. She disagrees but not vehemently.
“I think that a lot of people related to us and a lot of people were laughing with us. It was across the gamut, you know? I can remember I went into this small store in Malibu and there were three women and one of them said, ‘There’s that terrible woman from that awful family.’ And I was like, ‘Heyyyy, missus! Rude!’ And then just walked out. You can’t love everybody, can you? And if I’m not their cup of tea, just turn the TV off.”
My main memory of The Osbournes, I say, was Ozzy making no sense and falling over — but perhaps that was simply the edit. “But you’ve got to remember: Ozzy wasn’t sober during any of it. Not one day. Totally stoned every day.”
Her family discuss the effects of the show on them to this day, including on the rather good The Osbournes Podcast. In a recent edition Ozzy said that the show sent him “crazy” because there was no safe room where he could pick his nose or squeeze a pimple, but both Kelly and Jack lamented quite seriously its effects on their mental health. Both became addicted to painkillers and Kelly relapsed with alcohol during lockdown.
Jack, who as a teenager had succumbed to OxyContin, the prescription drug that unmade America, is the hero of the tale, having kept his 12-steps faith for 20 years and fought the relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis he was diagnosed with in 2012 with diet and exercise. He also went to college in his twenties. On the podcast he stands out for his delivery of considered opinions. Although I do not put it in those terms to his mother, who calls him her “rock”, he is the educated Osbourne.
In any case, on the podcast Sharon ruled that The Osbournes was “good for all of us” because it launched their careers in showbusiness. Jack is a documentary maker and presenter (of paranormal shows such as Jack Osbourne’s Night of Terror) and Kelly a singer and a regular on talent-show judging panels. Sharon further justified it because the series provided the family’s own animated family album.
“It’s a great thing to leave for your family. And we had amazing times. So many doors opened. I mean, look at me.”
Well, yes, I am, and it is impossible not to like and even respect this woman, the ultimate pragmatist whose lodestar is loyalty to her husband, her children and, at the latest count, five grandchildren. She says with age she has changed for the better, but I am not sure that a personality as strong as hers can ever change very much. For instance, she says she now knows money cannot save relationships, but she still enthuses about Jack’s recent “lovely wedding” in a luxury venue in Santa Barbara to his partner, Aree Gearhart — just as in Unbreakable she mooned over his Hawaii-beach marriage to his first wife, Lisa Stelly, with whom he would have three daughters, 11 years ago. They separated in 2018.
The pleasure of Unbreakable was reading about Osbourne’s intense feuds with, among others, the singer Dannii Minogue (“She was dark, very dark”), the actress Leah Remini (“unprofessional and childish”), most of the top brass at NBC (“unimaginative arseholes”) and The X Factor creator Simon Cowell, although they kissed and made up. Therapy has supposedly taught her to let go of grudges, yet I would say her language remains pugilistic. I ask what she would say to Cowell if he asked her to join the panel of a revived X Factor: “I’d say stick it up your arse,” she replies.
But to summarise, her present intentions are no more feuds, no more plastic surgery? “There’s nothing left to pull. My mouth will be like the Joker’s.”
And no more rowing with Ozzy? “We’ve rowed about everything. There’s not a subject left. All of that’s gone. We’re argued out now. So there’s peace and harmony.”
We end on a handshake. Last time, I say, I got a hug — so she gives me one of those too. Sharon Osbourne is not really distant. I think she is tired: too many Ozzy emergencies, too many feuds, too many bizarre medical choices, too many tissues soaking up too many tears. Also — and it is my parting shot to her — I think she needs to eat something.
Sharon Osbourne — Cut the Crap is at the Fortune Theatre in London (January 21 and 28) and the Alexandra in Birmingham (January 24); sharonosbournelive.co.uk
