For years, Ozzy Osbourne was at a loss about his own longevity.
Once, after reeling off all the drugs and alcohol he had used in his life, a doctor asked him, “Why are you still alive?”
The cognac-gulping, pill-chomping Black Sabbath frontman, famous for biting the head off a bat on stage, had no answer.
“I’ve often wondered the same thing myself,” he wrote in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2007. “To all appearances, I am a medical miracle.”
In good spirits: The frail Ozzy Osbourne was spotted on Wednesday after announcing his retirement from touring and canceling all remaining shows while he recovered from spinal surgery
Perhaps it’s this perceived immortality that made the 74-year-old’s recent and sudden decline in health, triggered by a battle with Parkinson’s disease, all the more difficult to bear.
His disappointment was palpable this week when he announced he was finally retiring from touring, citing health reasons following surgery on his spine.
Osbourne, who hails from working-class origins in Birmingham, England, told his 5.2million Instagram followers on Wednesday, “I never thought it would end like this.”
The statement was shared again by his TV star wife Sharon, with whom he shares three children and four grandchildren, who posted it with a simple heartbroken emoji.
It marked a quiet and low-key end to a career riddled with debauchery and scandal.
From addiction and near-death experiences to countless affairs, a reality TV show and even attempted murder of his own wife, traces the story of one of the world’s most scandalous rock legends.
Ozzy’s infamous 1982 bat-bitting concert
Osbourne was performing at the Des Moines Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Iowa in January 1982 when a concertgoer threw a bat onto the stage.
Without pausing, Osbourne ripped open the creature with his teeth, his mouth filling with blood as the audience watched in horror.
It was a moment he would never live to see again, as the incident has surfaced in almost every interview he’s done since. A YouTube clip of it has been viewed 5.8 million times.
Osbourne has repeatedly insisted he thought the bat was a rubber toy and complained about having to rush to the nearest hospital for a rabies shot.
He also claims the bat was alive – although this has been disputed by viewer Mark Neal, who claims to have thrown the animal and insisted it was dead.
Osbourne’s most famous moment was when he bit off the head of a bat during a concert in 1982. He claims he thought it was a rubber toy
Osbourne performed for his second solo tour, Diary of a Madman, during which he encouraged audiences to throw disturbing objects at him onstage.
A year earlier, he had bitten off the heads of two pigeons after being bored by a publicist at a meeting with record company CBS.
“The dove was a total freak of nature, if you will,” he said during an A&E documentary, The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne:
“I was absolutely drunk and was introduced to the head of the CBS LA bureau.
“It wasn’t a publicity stunt, I was just freaking out about drugs and alcohol. It shook everyone to death.’
Attempted murder of his wife Sharon
Dubbed the “Prince of Darkness,” Osbourne has been arrested multiple times, perhaps most famously for an attempted murder of Sharon in 1989.
The pair were returning from the Moscow Music Peace Festival, where Osbourne reportedly drank four bottles of vodka combined with a drug cocktail.
He is said to have “calmly” lunged at his wife as he tried to strangle her.
Reflecting on the arrest in an interview with Rolling Stone last September, he said: “It wasn’t my idea to go out, have a couple of drinks and wake up in prison on a charge of attempted murder.”
At the time, all three of the couple’s children were under the age of seven.
Osbourne has been arrested multiple times, most notably for the attempted murder of his wife Sharon. Pictured following a public intoxication charge in Memphis in 1984
Osbourne has been arrested multiple times, most notably for the attempted murder of his wife Sharon. Pictured following a public intoxication charge in Memphis in 1984
They remained married, but the judge ordered Osbourne to go to rehab for six months.
Sharon later told the documentary Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: “I told him, ‘If you do that again, I’m either going to kill you or you’re going to kill me. And do you want that for the kids?’
Osbourne was jailed by Texas authorities in 1982 after urinating near the 60-foot-tall Cenotaph monument at the Alamo Plaza. In 1984 he was arrested again for public intoxication in Memphis, Tennessee.
A VERY rockin’ rock ‘n’ roll love life
Sharon shocked viewers of The Talk in 2016 when she revealed she had found her husband in bed with their children’s two nannies – albeit on separate occasions.
The red-haired TV star downplayed the incident, insisting he was “crazy” about drugs and alcohol, but the story surprises no one who’s followed Osbourne’s love life closely.
He first met Sharon in the mid-1970s when he was married to his first wife Thelma Riley, with whom he had three children.
Osbourne had cheated on Riley several times before they divorced in 1982. That same year he married Sharon, daughter of then Black Sabbath manager Don Arden.
But their marriage was also mired in cheating allegations.
In addition to the nanny incidents, Sharon also discovered that Osbourne was having an affair with his hairdresser in 2016.
He then sought therapy for sex addiction, and the couple stuck together.
TV star Sharon has always stayed with her husband despite his dependencies and numerous affairs. Pictured in 2020
Struggles with addiction
At one point in his life, Osbourne claims to have drunk four bottles of cognac a day.
During the filming of the MTV series The Osbournes, he swallowed up to 42 prescription pills a day. Viewers at the time noted his “zombie-like” appearance.
Osbourne said his addiction to alcohol, drugs and prescription drugs lasted “forty years”.
Due to his long drinking and drug excesses, he was fired by his members of the Black Sabbath band in 1979.
He claims to have spent three months at Hotel Le Parc in Los Angeles, where his dealer made deliveries to him every day.
He tried rehab several times. In 1984, he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in California and famously asked where the bar was on his first day.
Osbourne has been sober for almost a decade now – although he claims he doesn’t count.
“My approach was, if I had a leg amputated, I wouldn’t want to sit in a room for the rest of my life and talk to other people about how I lost my leg,” he told Rolling Stones magazine. 2022. “I just have to adapt and move on.”
Osbourne has suffered badly from addiction, claiming he once drank up to four bottles of cognac and later drank 42 prescription pills each day — albeit at different times
Countless encounters with death
The rock legend has escaped death so many times that in the noughties he was given a health column in the Sunday Times magazine advising others on how to live a long life.
Not only were these incidents prompted by his addiction (or a 40-year drug and alcohol spree as he describes it), but he also suffered a series of freak accidents.
In March 1982 – just two months after the bat bite – he was sleeping in the back of a tour bus in Leesburg, Fla., when a plane carrying some of his followers clipped him on the side before crashing into a nearby house.
The accident killed everyone on the plane, including Osbourne’s 25-year-old guitarist, Randall Rodes.
Osbourne also claims to have been medically dead twice.
He told the Sunday Times he was in a chemically induced coma after breaking his neck in a quad bike incident in 2003.
“I now have more metal screws in me than in an Ikea flatpack,” he wrote.
Osbourne and his family appeared on their own MTV reality series in the early 2000s. Sharon and Ozzy are pictured with their children Jack (far left) and Kelly (far right) in 2002