“Everybody has an opinion about your religion and the way you live your life!”
Ahead of her one-woman show, Sharon Osbourne talks to Brigit Grant about standing with Israel and returning home
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
Why don’t people like Jews?” That’s the question Ozzy Osbourne has been asking his wife since the day they met.
Forty-three years on and Sharon still doesn’t have a tangible answer. The wobble in her voice is unfamiliar. It wasn’t there when she was being judgy on X Factor or America’s Got Talent or when she delivers fearless answers as a Talk TV regular. The wobble reveals her sadness. “I can’t believe what is going on in the world. It’s so bad. And the ugliness I hear from men and women is abhorrent. Ozzy is so confused by it all and just keeps asking me to explain why there is so much hatred of Jews. What do I say?”
Being lost for words – many of them expletives – was never an issue for Sharon, Ozzy and two of their three children, Jack and Kelly, when they erupted onto our screens in MTV’s The Osbournes in 2002. Over four insane seasons, everything from sex and alcohol to infidelity was discussed unashamedly and then with huge emotion when Sharon was diagnosed with cancer and Ozzy had a bad Quad bike accident.
They are no longer sharing their lives with millions, but the family – which now includes Jack’s four daughters – are still together all the time, and they currently discuss the Israel-Hamas war and share their fears and help their friends. This has been their focus since October 7, when Hamas perpetrated the atrocities.
“I talk to Jack about it for hours every day and his Jewish friends come to him for advice,” says Sharon. “About where to get bullet-proof vests and self-protection because they feel threatened. And Kelly has friends in Israel she speaks to. They’re very frightened, but they’re okay. Thank God.”
In January, Sharon is bringing her one-woman show Cut The Crap! (live and uncensored) to the stage in London and Birmingham. This was the reason for our chat but she, like all of us, has one thing on her mind. “It’s a tragedy on both sides. The people in Palestine are caught under a regime of mad men. Some of them support the mad men and some don’t, but children who have nothing to do with any of it are caught in it too and those beautiful little lives are wiped out because of war on both sides.”
Proudly Jewish through her late father, music manager Don Arden (pictured with her above), Sharon recently decried Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters on Talk TV for his antisemitic views and leaves no doubt about where her support lies.
“It’s outrageous that people should be taking sides in this war. Hamas, as leaders of the Palestinian people, knew what was going to happen if they did what they did. And did they think that the Jews were going to go, ‘Oh, okay. Let’s sit down and try to work this out’? Are they crazy? They’ve poked the giant and woken it up. They’re going to come for you.”
Revered as the Osbourne matriarch, Sharon’s stand with Israel is upheld by all her family, including “all my aunts and cousins in Manchester”. She adds: “It’s just hideous to think of deserting that and not standing up for who you are at this time. Who people choose to support has come down to what’s fashionable.
“You’ve got all these students who’ve had no life experience giving their opinions and it’s like, you idiots, you don’t understand what this is about. For them it’s David and Goliath and people always go for the underdog. But why are they the underdog? What’s going on? They don’t look deeper. I am just amazed by the way the world is today. You’re either black or white. There’s no in-between.
“It also amazes me that so many young Jewish people from all over the world are going to Israel to help. How many Palestinians are going back to Palestine?”
The Osbournes were last in Israel in 2018, when Ozzy, Black Sabbath’s front man and self-described ‘Prince of Darkness’, took his No More Tours 2 tour to Rishon Lezion’s Live Park. True to form, at a press conference ahead of the performance, Sharon, as the band’s manager, gave short shrift to a reporter who asked if Ozzy had felt any pressure not to play in Israel. “I’m half a Heeb,” said Sharon. “We play where we want to play.”
Heavy Metal pioneer Ozzy may have famously bitten the head off a bat, but Sharon is ready to bite the head off any adversary. This would have been interesting for the other acts she managed – The Smashing Pumpkins, Gary Moore, Motörhead and ELO.
Sharon attributes her combative streak to her father Don, who changed his name from Herschel and his surname from Levy to Arden when he encountered prejudice and “couldn’t get any work with the Jewish one”.
It was his name that made Herschel Levy a victim of antisemitism when he was in the army in the Second World War. “His fellow officers would wake him in the middle of the night and make him dig holes in the rain, telling him they did it “‘because you’re a f***ing Jew and this war is over you and why we have to fight.’
“After the war, we were living in Brixton and my dad used to go out and fight when Mosley was giving a speech.”
Sharon knows Don would be appalled at the Israel attacks and the current rise in antisemitism and would go head to head with any perpetrators. “One of the reasons my dad was a violent man is because of the things people said to him in those days. It’s like it is today. Everybody has an opinion about you, your religion and the way you live your life.”
Sharon’s own experience of hate came via social media as personal vitriol following her 2021 departure from the CBS show The Talk after she defended Piers Morgan’s comments about the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle. The comments ended Piers’ job on Good Morning Britain and Sharon was accused of being “racially insensitive” by a co-host.
Even with a $10 million (£8m) payout, the anguish of being “falsely labelled a racist” and sacrificed to cancel culture remained. Considering her rock ‘n’ roll heritage, it was a Kafkaesque charge. “It took a long time and a lot of therapy to heal,” says Sharon. “It was probably one of the worst things that has happened in my career. But I didn’t want to have that horrible feeling inside me. So I got rid of all the anger and the way I felt about the situation. When you carry stuff like that, it changes your personality.”
Sharon’s personality will be fully intact for her upcoming shows as she took precautions. Ignoring social media works. “I’m not giving people the satisfaction of hurting me,” she says, but she will take questions from the audience at her shows.
“I’ll answer anything,” says the TV star who yelled at her kids and threw bagels into her noisy neighbour’s garden on camera. Not that they will be her neighbours for much longer, as Sharon and Ozzy are returning in the new year to their home in the Chilterns, where, along with plans to acquire more pets, including a donkey, they will host a family podcast (including eldest daughter Aimee) and make a film about the ups and downs of their decades together, with music from Black Sabbath.
“It felt the time was right to move back,” says Sharon, but reveals Ozzy is disturbed at the prospect. “He sees all the marches on TV and there’s so much of it in the UK. But he always says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.’”
Beyond the madness and mayhem in their iconic TV show, The Osbournes delivered the powerful lesson that was “to learn how to love and forget how to hate”. I’m reminded of this as our chat comes to an end and Sharon tells me that she and Ozzy were at a wedding on October 7. “We were sat at a table with a couple who were Holocaust survivors and we had just heard about Israel. I thought, ‘Imagine what is going through their minds right now.’ A life of living through such hate.” And back comes the wobble in her voice.
Sharon Osbourne Cut The Crap! is on at Fortune Theatre in London on 21 and 28 January 2024 and at The Alexandra in Birmingham on 24 January 2024.
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