The Libertine World of Ozzy Osbourne – Bats biting Sharon finding him in bed with the nanny

For years, Ozzy Osbourne was stumped by 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-drinking, pill-popping Black Sabbath frontman is famous for biting the head off a bat onstage, had no answer.

“I have often wondered the same thing,” he wrote in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2007. “By all accounts, I am a medical miracle.”

It is perhaps this perceived immortality that made the 74-year-old’s recent sudden decline in health, brought on by a battle with Parkinson’s disease, all the more difficult to bear.

This week, his disappointment was palpable when he announced he was retiring from touring for good, citing health reasons following spinal surgery.

Osbourne, who comes from a working-class background in Birmingham, England, told her 5.2 million Instagram followers on Wednesday: “I never imagined it would end this way.”

The statement was shared by his wife, TV star Sharon, with whom he shares three children and four grandchildren, who posted it with a simple heartbroken emoji.

It marked a quiet, low-key end to a career that has been filled with debauchery and scandal.

From addictions and near-death experiences to countless adventures, a reality TV show and even an attempted murder on his own wife, Dailymail.com recounts the story of one of the world’s most outrageous rock legends.

Ozzy’s infamous 1982 bat bite 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 pause, Osbourne tore at the creature with his teeth, its mouth filling with blood as the audience watched in horror.

It was a moment he would never forget, with the incident appearing in almost every interview he has done since. A YouTube clip has been viewed 5.8 million times.

Osbourne has repeatedly insisted that he thought the bat was a rubber toy, complaining that he had to rush to the nearest hospital for a rabies shot.

He also alleges that the bat was alive, although this was disputed by audience member Mark Neal, who claims to have dumped the animal and insisted it was dead.

Osbourne was performing for his second solo tour, Diary of a Madman, where he encouraged audience members to throw disturbing objects at him on stage.

A year earlier he had decapitated two pigeons after getting bored with a publicist during a meeting with the CBS record company.

“The pigeon was a total freak of nature, if you will,” he recounted during an A&E documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne, saying:

“I was absolutely drunk and was being introduced to the head of the CBS Los Angeles branch.

“It wasn’t a publicity stunt, I was just crazy on drugs and alcohol. He shocked everyone.

Attempted murder of his wife Sharon

As the so-called “Prince of Darkness”, Osbourne has been arrested multiple times, perhaps most famously for a 1989 assassination attempt on Sharon.

The couple were returning from the Moscow Music for Peace Festival where Osbourne had reportedly drunk four bottles of vodka laced with a drug cocktail.

He reportedly “calmly” lunged at his wife as he attempted to strangle her to death.

Reflecting on the arrest in an interview with Rolling Stone last September, he said: “It wasn’t my idea to go out, have a few drinks and wake up in jail on a charge of attempted murder.”

At the time, the couple’s three children were under the age of seven.

They remained married, but the judge ordered Osbourne to attend rehab for six months.

Sharon later told the Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne documentary: “I told him, ‘If you do this again, I’m going to kill you or you’re going to kill me.’ And you want that for the kids?

Osbourne was also locked up in 1982 by Texas authorities after urinating near the 60-foot-tall Cenotaph monument in Alamo Plaza. He was arrested again for public intoxication in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1984.

A VERY ROCKY LOVE LIFE

Sharon shocked The Talk audience members in 2016 when she revealed that she had found her husband in bed with two of their children’s babysitters, albeit on separate occasions.

The redheaded TV star downplayed the incident, insisting he was “crazy” on drugs and alcohol, but the story comes as no surprise to anyone who has closely followed Osbourne’s love life.

He first met Sharon in the mid-1970s while he was married to his first wife, Thelma Riley, with whom he shared three children.

Osbourne had already cheated on Riley several times before divorcing in 1982. He married Sharon, the daughter of then-Black Sabbath manager Don Arden, that same year.

But their marriage was also embroiled in cheating allegations.

In addition to the babysitter incidents, Sharon also discovered that Osbourne had been having an affair with her hairstylist in 2016.

She subsequently sought therapy for sex addiction, and the couple stayed together.

battle with addiction

At one point in his life, Osbourne claims to have drunk four bottles of cognac a day.

While filming the MTV series The Osbournes, he was taking up to 42 prescription pills a day. Viewers commented at the time of his appearance ‘like a zombie’.

Osbourne has said that his dependence on alcohol, drugs and prescription drugs lasted ‘forty years’.

His long drunken streak of alcohol and drugs saw him fired by members of his Black Sabbath gang in 1979.

He claims to have spent three months at the Le Parc hotel in Los Angeles, where his dealer delivered to him every day.

He tried rehabilitation on several occasions. In 1984 she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in California, and asked where the bar was on her first day.

Osbourne has been sober for nearly a decade, though he says he doesn’t keep track.

“The way I approached it was, if I had a leg amputated, I wouldn’t want to sit in a room for the rest of my life talking to other people about how I lost my leg,” he told Rolling Stones magazine in 2022.’ I just have to adapt and move on.’

Countless brushes with death

The rock legend has escaped death so many times that he was given a health column in the Sunday Times magazine in the 2000s to advise others on how to maintain longevity.

These incidents were not only brought on by his addictions (or a 40-year drug and alcohol binge, as he describes it), but he also suffered a series of freak accidents.

In March 1982, just two months after the bat-bite incident, he was sleeping in the back of a tour bus in Leesburg, Florida, when a plane carrying part of his entourage struck the side before crashing into a nearby house.

The crash 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 that he was in a chemically induced coma after breaking his neck in a quad bike incident in 2003.

“I have more metal screws now than in a flat pack from Ikea,” he wrote.