She was the only Osbourne who was determined to avoid the spotlight.
So much so that as the cameras moved into the family’s sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, Aimee Osbourne, who was then just 16, moved out.
While MTV’s The Osbournes, which launched in 2002, catapulted her younger siblings Kelly and Jack to worldwide fame, Aimee stayed in the shadows, refusing to be drawn into the world of reality television.
Yet almost 25 years later she’s finally broken her silence, appearing extensively in a two-hour long feature length documentary about her father Ozzy, the legendary Black Sabbath frontman who died, aged 76, in July – just two weeks after returning to Britain for a farewell concert.
Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now, which is available to stream on Paramount Plus from October 7, features for the first time the full Osbourne clan, including Ozzy and Sharon, and their three children: Aimee, 42, Kelly, 40 and Jack, 39.
Including footage recorded before the legendary rocker’s death, it charts his final six years as he battles a litany of health problems.
Known as the ‘silent’ Osbourne, Aimee has, according to reports, not had the easiest relationship with her mother and siblings – particularly Kelly – over the years.
At one stage, the sisters weren’t on speaking terms, with Kelly admitting in an interview they just ‘didn’t understand each other’.
Aimee Osbourne has finally broken her silence, appearing extensively in a two-hour long feature length documentary Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape from Now
Pictured L-R: Sharon Osbourne, Aimee and Ozzy Osbourn in 2004
Her father Ozzy, the legendary Black Sabbath frontman died, aged 76, in July – just two weeks after returning to Britain for a farewell concert. Pictued L-R: Kelly (far left) Sharon, Aimee (centre) and Louis (right, son of Ozzy and Thelma Riley)
Yet Aimee was there for Ozzy’s final days, and joined the rest of her family for the documentary in a touching show of unity, as they describe how the iconic rocker battled ill health for years.
The documentary begins with Ozzy’s late-night fall in February 2019, at the family’s Los Angeles mansion, when he tripped over a step going to the bathroom, and broke his neck – an injury that was initially overlooked.
A former hellraising drug addict, it’s fair to say that Ozzy was hardly in the best shape before the fall: he’d suffered a near-fatal quad bike accident in 2003 in which he crushed several vertebrae.
Yet it was this dramatic fall, 16 years later, which started his descent into a serious decline.
Soon afterwards he was diagnosed with a genetic form of Parkinson’s Disease, and never recovered full mobility.
In the show, Ozzy reveals for the first time how, at one point, he sank into a deep depression, which left him suicidal.
In a typically witty, expletive-ridden message from the grave, we hear Ozzy describing the dark thoughts that stalked him.
‘The thought of not doing gigs anymore. I went into a dark place. I’m on antidepressants now actually because I was getting ready to off myself.’
But with his trademark humour he adds: ‘But then I thought, “What are you f***king talking about?” Because knowing me, I’d do it and I’d be half dead … I’d set myself on fire and I wouldn’t die. That’s my luck.’
Aimee calmly summarises the situation thus: ‘He’s had many accidents that I’ve witnessed, but you could tell this was not one he was necessarily going to get away with in the same way.’
Her feelings proved to be eerily prescient and the film draws a direct connection from the fall in 2019, to his eventual demise in July this year, from heart failure at the family’s UK home in Buckinghamshire, just 13 days after an emotional farewell concert.
If all good movies must have a villain, then in this tale it is the surgeon who treated Ozzy.
Known as the ‘silent’ Osbourne, Aimee has, according to reports, not had the easiest relationship with her mother and siblings – particularly Kelly – over the years
Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now, which is available to stream on Paramount Plus from October 7, features for the first time the full Osbourne clan, including Ozzy and Sharon, and their three children: Aimee, 42, Kelly, 40 and Jack, 39
For while we see him moments before the surgery dancing from the waist up in his hospital bed to the delight of his family, hours later it is a very different story.
As Kelly puts bluntly. ‘I watched my dad from being able to sit up to having posture like f***ing Gollum,’ referring to the hunched creature from Lord of the Rings.
Aimee, who’s kept her private life very much to herself over the years, and has never married or had children, appears as a sea of calm among the chaos.
‘He was in hospital for weeks,’ she explains. ‘I think just in a lot of shock, also traumatised, to fall like that and then go through that, and then not be able to bounce back like he had in the past, and then having to cancel the tour, that was really, I think, his biggest heartbreak.’
‘We brought him home, but the pain just never subsided,’ continues Sharon. ‘It was unbearable, constantly. I know he’s a drama queen. He’ll do anything for a pain pill, but it was for real. I mean, you can look in someone’s eyes and know.’
‘Every month, instead of getting stronger, he got weaker… every month went by, he would be fading, fading, fading.’
Sharon scoured America for the best surgeons to undo the damage, but despite repeated corrective surgeries, Ozzy never fully recovered.
The toll on Ozzy wasn’t just physical but mental, and this is the darkest chapter in the film.
After three years of chronic pain, and going longer than he had ever gone without performing on stage, depression hits.
Ozzy says: ‘No matter what you do, it’s always there. When you’re in a certain amount of pain, it affects your thought pattern and you can’t enjoy anything.’
He also struggled with the constant attention of his carers and health team.
‘I’ve not been on my own for f***ing four years,’ he says. ‘I end up doing is sitting in the toilet reading a book. It’s to be on my own. We all need that little bit of space for ourselves.’
In the show, Ozzy reveals for the first time how, at one point, he sank into a deep depression, which left him suicidal
In his lowest moments he apologises to Sharon for being a burden on her. With tears in her eyes she explains: ‘Some days that he wishes he was dead. He’s in so much pain he can’t take it. He just wishes he could go’
The documentary begins with Ozzy’s late-night fall in February 2019, at the family’s Los Angeles mansion, when he tripped over a step going to the bathroom, and broke his neck – an injury that was initially overlooked. Above, the family pictured in 2002
