Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Gavin Edwards). Here’s an excerpt:
July 22, 2025
Ozzy Osbourne, who achieved enormous success as a pioneer of two wildly popular entertainment genres, heavy metal music and reality television, died on Tuesday. He was 76. His family announced the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause. He had been treated in recent years for a variant of Parkinson’s disease that he identified as Parkinsonism or Parkin 2, a condition exacerbated by his chronic drug abuse. Although Mr. Osbourne repeatedly announced his retirement over the years — he called a series of live dates in 1992 the “No More Tours” tour and a 2018 series “No More Tours II” — he gave his final concert this month, at a festival in his hometown, Birmingham, England, in his honor. Seated on a black throne, visibly moved by the enthusiasm of the crowd, he closed out his career by reuniting the original lineup of his heavy metal group Black Sabbath…As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Mr. Osbourne was one of the inventors of heavy metal. As a solo artist, he became a remarkably durable star, with 13 platinum albums and the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” But he achieved even wider fame for his rock ’n’ roll excess, including an onstage incident in which he bit the head off a bat…
“All the stuff onstage, the craziness, it’s all just a role that I play, my work,” Mr. Osbourne insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”
[…]
Born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham on Dec. 3, 1948, he was the fourth of six children of John Thomas Osbourne, a toolmaker who worked the night shift at a power plant, and Lillian (Levy) Osbourne, who worked the day shift at an auto-parts factory. The Osbournes were crammed into a small working-class home; when Ozzy was young, it had no indoor plumbing. An indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, Ozzy dropped out of school at age 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse. After he was fired from that job (for fighting), he had a brief career as a burglar; when he was arrested, his father declined to pay the fine, and Ozzy spent three months in prison, which led him to abandon his criminal ambitions.