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On July 22, 2025, the world lost its "Prince of Darkness", the co-founder of heavy metal, the eccentric and chaotic Ozzy Osbourne. The Black Sabbath singer was notorious for his escapades, controversies, and the bat incident. Yet the closer Osbourne let his audience get to him, the more the image of the dark metal legend faded. He showed himself to be vulnerable, admitted mistakes, and poked fun at himself. Behind the myth, the human being emerged ever more clearly.
Traumatic Childhood Experience
Ozzy Osbourne was born on December 3, 1948, in Birmingham and grew up in the postwar era in the working-class neighborhood of Aston. His childhood had nothing in common with his later life as a star. His family lived with six children on the edge of poverty.
Osbourne tried early on to escape his demons. The working-class kid from Aston felt out of place, suffered from his undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD, was bullied, and turned to alcohol and substances early. He later explained the consumption as a form of self-medication. "I've always self-medicated because I've never felt comfortable in my own skin", he told "Variety". Osbourne continued: "And so from a young age, I sniffed fumes - all kinds of things, just anything to distract myself."
Music also offered him a refuge. He described a Beatles song in an interview with "Esquire" as life-changing. "When I heard 'She Loves You' for the first time, my world exploded like a shooting star. It was a heavenly moment. After that, nothing was ever the same", Osbourne said. He himself would open up a new world for people with Tony Iommi (78), Geezer Butler (77), and Bill Ward (78) as Black Sabbath.
Great Emptiness After Black Sabbath Dismissal
While peace, love, and flower power were still being sung about in many places in the late 1960s, the four musicians relied on heavy guitar riffs and dark lyrics. Butler was mainly responsible for the latter, but Osbourne made them his own with his distinctive voice. With the debut album "Black Sabbath" and "Paranoid", released just a few months later, they created the foundation of heavy metal. But over the years, the band's structure began to crack. In 1979, Osbourne had to leave the band - allegedly because his substance and alcohol consumption made him unreliable. But the farewell wasn't entirely final. In 2013, he celebrated his return on Black Sabbath's final album "13" and went on a farewell tour with the band in 2016 and 2017.
But after his dismissal, Osbourne's world initially collapsed. According to reports, he holed up in a hotel room in Hollywood for months, numbing himself with alcohol and substances. The turning point came through Sharon Arden (73), the daughter of then-Black Sabbath manager Don Arden (1926-2007). She took over his management and laid the foundation for his solo career.
But even the fresh start was overshadowed by tragedy. In 1982, Osbourne's guitarist Randy Rhoads (1956-1982) died. The loss haunted him for years. Even decades later, he stated that he took antidepressants because of it. That same year, his marriage to Thelma Riley, with whom he has three children, also fell apart. In retrospect, Osbourne described himself as a "nightmare" and admitted that the failure of the marriage was entirely his fault.
Violent Outburst and Success with "The Osbournes"
Still in the year of his divorce, he married his manager Sharon Osbourne, with whom he had children Aimee (42), Kelly (41), and Jack (40). Their marriage survived countless crises, including one of the darkest episodes in Osbourne's life. In 1989, under the massive influence of alcohol and substances, he attempted to strangle his wife. He was arrested and released on the condition that he begin rehabilitation therapy. Sharon stayed by his side through it all. In his memoir "Last Rites", Osbourne later wrote: "Sharon, I'm sorry. And thank you for giving me another chance when almost everyone else would have turned away from me."
Rehabilitation programs and relapses followed. That the public learned about it was due in no small part to the MTV show "The Osbournes". In it, viewers also got to know the quirky side of the metal icon, his problems with technology and dog training, and Osbourne as a family man. The show became so famous that younger generations no longer knew him as a musician but as a TV star, as Osbourne himself said.
How He Envisioned His Grave
His health problems also increasingly became a topic. In 2003, he crashed on a quad bike. As a result, he had to undergo several operations. In 2019, he fell, the old injuries worsened, and he had to have multiple spinal surgeries. A year later, he made his Parkinson's disease public. He could walk less and less well.
However, this didn't prevent him from giving a farewell concert with Black Sabbath on July 5, 2025. At Villa Park in Birmingham, he sat on a throne before over 40,000 spectators who celebrated him one last time. Just about two weeks later, he died at age 76 from coronary heart disease and Parkinson's.
How great his influence was also became apparent during the funeral procession. Thousands of fans came together to pay their final respects to the Prince of Darkness. He was buried on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. That's how he had wished it. "I want to be buried in the ground, somewhere in a beautiful garden, with a tree over my head. Preferably a crabapple tree, so the kids can make wine from me and get properly intoxicated with it", he reportedly wrote in his autobiography "I Am Ozzy". He further shared his vision for his epitaph: "When I close my eyes, I can already see it: 'Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.'"
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