Kelly Osbourne has described what her family did in the days immediately after her father died, and it is not what most families do.
“We didn’t put my dad in any sort of morgue,” she told HELLO! in her first interview and photoshoot since Ozzy Osbourne’s death. “He came straight home and we got to spend a few days with him and mourn with him, and make sure that everything was the way we wanted it to be.”
Ozzy died on 22 July 2025 at the age of 76, at home in England and surrounded by his family, a little over a fortnight after performing a final show with Black Sabbath in Aston, the Birmingham district where the band began. The public farewell came a week after his death: on 30 July, tens of thousands of people lined Broad Street as his cortege moved through the city, led by a brass band playing Sabbath songs, before it halted at the Black Sabbath Bridge.
What Kelly has now filled in is the gap between those two events — the quiet days at home that the crowds on Broad Street knew nothing about.
“A part of me died, too”
Speaking at Cliveden House in Berkshire, a short drive from the countryside home she is still unpacking, Kelly, 41, said the year since had been the hardest of her life.
“I’ll never be the person I was before my father died… a part of me died, too,” she said. “Everything is different. I’m different. Everything has changed, but it’s just taking it one day at a time and putting the pieces back together in a way that you think will work.”
She was unequivocal about what the public response meant to the family, including her mother Sharon, 73. “It saved us,” she said. “Every note, every flower, every gift that was sent to us — we received, we read, we acknowledged.” Of her father’s home city, she added that she is proud half of her comes from Birmingham, and that Ozzy “will always be that little boy from Aston.”
There is a small but real tension in the record about the weeks before he died. Days before his death, Kelly had publicly dismissed a claim circulating online that her father was dying, saying he was not. After he died, his sister Jean Powell told The Mirror that when she saw him at his final Black Sabbath performance on 5 July he “could not stand up straight” and was frail, though “still our John, still cracking the jokes.” Both accounts are first-hand and neither has been retracted; they describe the same man weeks apart, from inside a family that had spent years batting away speculation about his health.
The year that followed
The grief did not happen in private. When Kelly appeared at the Brit Awards in February, her changed appearance drew a wave of online comment, and she hit back publicly at what she called a special kind of cruelty aimed at someone visibly going through something. Mia Tyler, daughter of Steven Tyler, was among those who defended her.
Asked by HELLO! how she navigated that period, her answer was blunt. “I didn’t navigate it — I wasn’t well. How can you navigate something so cruel when you’re so sick? I’m getting a lot better. I’ve got all the help I need.”
She described the work since as slow and unglamorous. “You’ve got to fix the head before you can fix the body. It’s a slow process. It’s going to take me a minute. I’m not going to be fixed in a day. I’m not going to be fixed on one therapy session. This is a lifetime of work.”
Grief also thinned out her address book. “What you’ll find when you’re grieving is that people don’t know how to handle it, and you do lose a lot of friends. But the ones who stick around are the real ones.”
The same period brought the end of her engagement to Sid Wilson, the former Slipknot DJ who proposed backstage at Ozzy’s farewell concert and with whom she has a son, Sidney. Kelly declined to discuss the split, saying only that her focus is on her child. Reports of the breakup were widely covered earlier this year; she has not addressed the specifics herself.
Starting again in Buckinghamshire
The practical outcome of all this is a move. Kelly has left Los Angeles and returned to the UK with Sidney, who turns four in November and now attends the same pre-school she did as a child, where one of her old teachers still works. She cited gun violence in American schools as one reason for the decision: “I don’t ever want to have to explain to my son what to do during a gun raid.”
Her father is present in the house in a way she clearly finds sustaining rather than painful. Sidney calls him Papa, and according to Kelly, “he talks to his Papa every day.” Most people, she said, see Ozzy in him — the boy spent the first two years of his life largely in his grandparents’ house.
She speaks to Sharon “almost ten times a day,” and framed the relationship as one that has flipped: “You get to a certain age and it’s no longer your parents’ job to look after you — it’s your job to look after them.”
There is work coming, too, though she kept the details vague: a television project that “involves television, me, lots of animals and beginning again,” and a fashion brand still at the “embryonic stage.” In May she performed her 2005 single “One Word” live with Scissor Sisters in London, her first time singing it on stage in more than twenty years.
She was not willing to call herself happy. “Happy is not the word,” she said, “but I’m where I’m meant to be.”
