'Last Rites' review: Ozzy Osbourne in his twilight years

Ozzy Osbourne injured his neck in 2019, when he playfully stage-dived into bed and missed. Although he had spent the majority of his life as an alcoholic and addict, and he almost died in 2003 when the ATV he was riding fell on top of him, he had the constitution of a Viking and had enjoyed curiously good health.

“Until I was 70 I had the best life in the world,” Osbourne laments in “Last Rites,” his new, posthumously published memoir.

The book focuses on Osbourne’s illness-plagued last years, beginning with a staph infection in his fingers that would initiate the Great Unraveling of his health, and ending shortly before his July 22 death, age 76, of a heart attack.

A self-effacing and unexpectedly affecting portrait of the Prince of Darkness in twilight, “Last Rites” catalogues the catastrophes and ailments that beset Osbourne, then at a late career peak, as he tried unsuccessfully to complete one last tour.

Osbourne’s first memoir, the 2010 bestseller “I Am Ozzy,” chronicled his early years as a poor, dyslexic kid in Birmingham, England, and his multi-decade reign as heavy metal’s most familiar face, first as the front man of forerunning band Black Sabbath, then as a solo artist and, eventually, as a reality TV dad on the MTV series “The Osbournes.”

“Last Rites” retraces those high points, sometimes with lightning-round speed, though it lingers with pride on his Satanic Panic years.

We forget: Ozzy used to be scary. A presumed devil worshiper at precisely the time the country was terrified of devil worshipers, he was the scourge of parents, preachers and legislators. Nobody these days is as scary as we thought he was.

He was addicted to practically everything; alcohol, sex, cocaine, ice cream, buying fancy cars he didn’t know how to drive, pills, steroids. A substantial part of both memoirs consists of Osbourne, prone to drunken blackout rages, feeling awful for things other people tell him he’s done.

“That’s the thing about being an addict,” he writes, “you live in two worlds. The drunk world and the sober world. And what happens in one is like a half-remembered dream in the other.”

He had no memory of the time he tried to strangle his wife, Sharon, who dropped the charges. (Ozzy plainly adored Sharon, who spends much of “Last Rites” yelling at people, especially him, yet still seems like its most sensible character.)

In the early 2000s, Osbourne would slowly morph from a public menace on the downside of his career into the befuddled, affectionate patriarch of “The Osbournes.” It remains one of pop culture’s most astonishing transformations. Filming the show felt invasive, and the television industry was a viper’s nest, Osbourne recalled, but even the Prince of Darkness had to make a living.

It was during this time that his troubles began in earnest. In 2003, he flipped his ATV, broke his neck and remained in a coma for eight days. He became “an actual iron man, my shoulder and spine held together with metal plates, rods and screws.”

Those around him constantly expressed surprise that he was still alive, and Osbourne couldn’t quite seem to believe it, either. His diagnoses piled up alarmingly: emphysema, staph infections, sepsis, arrhythmia, blood clots, a form of Parkinson’s disease.

After Osbourne injured his neck again, the already delicate scaffolding of his body began to splinter. His last years were a downward spiral of disasters and disappointments; the tour was eventually abandoned, few of his countless spinal surgeries made things any better, and doctors kept discovering new things wrong with him.

As “Last Rites” winds down, he is semi-paralyzed, wheeled from one room of his British manse to another by nurses. “I feel like a crumbling statue,” he writes.

It isn’t as depressing as it sounds: Ozzy is frank and good-humored company, his very British postwar stiff upper lip intact until the end. Even at his most dire, he suggests Grandpa Simpson, shaking his fist at clouds and complaining about kids these days, with their iPhones and marijuana (“a gateway drug,” he worries).

Osbourne was determined to make it to one last show, and he did, a Black Sabbath charity gig he presided over from a black throne. He died 17 days later.

“Last Rites” doesn’t address this, it just ends, which is probably preferable. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” Osbourne observed. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”