Ozzy Osbourne’s talent show judge wife turned novelist (her new novel, Revenge, is the reason for our interview) will be aware, at least, that perceptions of her, on both sides of the Atlantic, are never tepid. “Telling it like it is,” as she puts it, is what Osbourne does best.
She first drew the public in as a ”tough love” matriarch battling to keep her rehabilitated rocker husband and two children (the third refused to participate) in check on the hit MTV reality show, The Osbournes. But when, in July 2002, she was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and insisted that filming should continue throughout her treatment, she garnered a reputation as a survivor.
Having stuck by her errant husband despite decades of drugs and adultery and overcome personal adversity, Osbourne emerged triumphant and unashamedly “bulls––t free” at the other end.
It’s that pathologically uncompromising streak which tends, every now and again, to land her in trouble. This is a woman who sent Tiffany boxes of her own excrement to journalists who criticised her children, threw juice over a model who insulted her husband on live TV, and cited co-judge Dannii Minogue as the reason she left ITV’s The X Factor in June, saying bluntly: “At the prospect of spending six months sitting next to her, I thought: ‘my life is better than that’.”
