“The time to just sit and do nothing has gone,” declared Sharon Osbourne in a March episode of The Osbournes Podcast, in which the matriarch of the entertainment family appeared with her son Jack. Sharon had every right to do nothing over the previous few months: her husband Ozzy, the beloved heavy metal singer, died in July 2025 aged 76. But Sharon signalled that taking it easy after his death was no longer on the agenda. “I’m better doing s—, keeping busy… planning stuff, trying to keep creative,” as she put it.
And, boy, has Sharon been keeping busy. The posthumous Ozzy Osbourne industry is spreading its wings like a pre-flight vampire bat. A major Ozzy biopic is in the works, while Universal Studios in the US recently opened two Ozzy-themed haunted-house rides, one in Hollywood and one in Orlando. The rides “are where music and mayhem collide”, according to Universal Studios’ blurb, while Sharon and Jack described them as “a wonderful tribute” to the former Prince of Darkness.
Meanwhile, there are plans for the current Ozzy exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to tour the world. On top of this, Ozzfest, the Osbourne’s travelling heavy metal festival that ran between 1996 and 2018, is set to return next summer in Birmingham. “2027. Aston Villa. We want to do two days in [the] Aston Villa [stadium, Villa Park] and then come to America,” Sharon, also Ozzy’s former manager, told the podcast.
There’s more. In May, Sharon and Jack announced at a Las Vegas trade show that Ozzy will return as an AI-powered avatar. Teaming up with tech company Hyperreal, the pair said that fans will be able to talk to the virtual Ozzy, which will share “the digital DNA” of his voice, image and movement. “You can ask Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice. We’re going to take it all around the world,” Sharon said. “Elvis died 50 years ago, and everybody knows Elvis. I just want that for Ozzy.”
But this last development – Forge Osbourne, if you will – has caused consternation among many fans, with some accusing the family of an Ozzy cash-grab. “This is dystopian s—. Let the man rest in peace,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “Don’t they have enough money?” asked another, on a message board that also labelled the move “disgusting”, “despicable” and “absolutely awful”.
Perran Helyes, presenter of the That’s Not Metal podcast, tells me he has “absolutely no moral problem at all” with the return of Ozzfest, with Ozzy as “a spiritual figurehead”. But he has “major reservations” about the avatar. “The corporate insistence that AI is going to be in our lives and we will like it and come to use it is one thing. But then you have the matter of necromantically reviving something through it without their consent. There’s something that is inherently unsettling about that,” says Helyes.
“It also, for me, goes against a great part of what Ozzy’s kind of music is meant to be.” Heavy metal is supposed to be an outsider art form, anti-establishment, alive, exciting, in-the-moment and all about “spreading human connection”, he says. “Inherently, when you sever that using an AI avatar, it lessens that.”
Sharon’s recent burst of activity extends beyond keeping the Ozzy flame alive. In April, she put the Los Angeles home she shared with Ozzy on the market for $17m (£12.6m). But there are suggestions of wider dramas in the Osbourne orbit. It was reported last week that Sharon is seeking to remove Ozzy’s long-term accountant, Colin Newman, as executor of her late husband’s will. Sharon has known Newman for decades: he was accountant to her father, the notorious music mogul Don Arden, and Sharon and Ozzy lived around the corner from the Newman household in Hampstead in the 1980s. It’s unclear why Sharon and her two other fellow executors are seeking the removal of Newman, who also resigned as a director of Ozzy’s main company Monowise in April, according to Companies House. Sharon and Newman were approached for comment.
There are also disagreements between Sharon and her youngest daughter Kelly over politics. Speaking on the red carpet at the National Television Awards in London recently, Kelly admitted to differences of opinion when asked about Sharon’s apparent support in the spring for a London rally organised by far-Right activist Tommy Robinson (prior to the Unite the Kingdom rally, Sharon wrote “See you at the march” beneath an Instagram post about it – it’s not known whether she attended). “It’s hard because I love my mum,” Kelly said, “but I also have to understand that she’s entitled to her own opinions as well. And it’s really hard when it comes to politics and things like that.” (This week Kelly also confirmed that she’d cut ties with her older sister Aimee).
Aged 73, it seems that Sharon has lost none of her legendary spikiness. In the summer she reignited a decades-old feud with Hole singer Courtney Love, who she accused in 2007 of giving her teenage children drugs, something that Love strenuously denied. “A dry, old c—,” were Sharon’s exact words in August.
