If a single individual could be said to embody the attributes of heavy metal, it would be Ozzy Osbourne, who has died aged 76 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other disorders. In a career stretching across six decades, Osbourne became a star with Black Sabbath in the 1970s, launched a hugely successful solo career in the 1980s, turned himself into a heavy metal entrepreneur in the 1990s with his travelling Ozzfest rock festival, and in 2002 became an unlikely but wildly successful reality TV star, thanks to the MTV show The Osbournes.

The Black Sabbath repertoire included songs with titles such as Paranoid, Evil Woman, Hand of Doom and Children of the Grave. The atmosphere was darkened further by the guitarist Tony Iommi’s fondness for tuning his strings lower than usual, and lyrics (mostly written by the bass player Geezer Butler) that alluded to the occult and mental illness, sung in Osbourne’s urgent high-register whine. His voice was not pretty but it was impossible to ignore as it sliced through Sabbath’s dense sludge of drums, bass and fuzz-toned guitar. “Sabbath never set out to be legendary,” Osbourne said in 2005. “The only thing we set out to do was scare people.”

Sabbath were a hit straight out of the blocks with their debut album, Black Sabbath (1970), which sailed into the UK Top 10 and reached 23 on the US Billboard chart, despite a hostile response from rock critics. Later that year they released the follow-up, Paranoid, which topped the British chart. Its tough and edgy title song gave them their only British Top 10 single (it went to No 4), while Iron Man and the outspokenly political War Pigs became staples of the Sabbath catalogue, each featuring a distinctive Iommi guitar riff.

The band’s hot streak continued through the albums Master of Reality (1971), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) and Sabotage (1975), but Never Say Die! (1978) signalled Osbourne’s departure and the end of Sabbath mark one. Following some chaotic touring and abortive recording sessions, Osbourne was fired in 1979. An alcohol-and-cocaine lifestyle coupled with legal squabbles with their management and record label had sapped the band’s strength. “I was drinking like a fish for two years,” Osbourne said. “I would have been dead in two or three years if I’d carried on.”

Black Sabbath were managed by the notably unsentimental music mogul Don Arden, who assigned his daughter, Sharon, to keep Ozzy sufficiently acquainted with the straight and narrow to be able to write songs and perform. She became his manager and, in 1982, his wife. She launched him as a solo artist, leading his own band, The Blizzard of Ozz, which featured the gifted guitarist and songwriter Randy Rhoads. When Warner Bros and EMI turned Osbourne down as a solo artist, Sharon signed him to her father’s label, Jet. Osbourne’s solo career was immediately successful, his debut album, Blizzard of Ozz (1980), producing a couple of hit singles with Crazy Train and Mr Crowley, the latter inspired by the occultist Aleister Crowley.

The follow-up, Diary of a Madman (1981), was another bestseller – in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy (2010), Osbourne cited this as his favourite album – and contained the drug-inspired hit single Flying High Again. However, Osbourne’s progress was rarely incident-free, and, marriage aside, 1982 was a particular annus horribilis. In January that year, when he was perfoming in Des Moines, Iowa, an audience member threw what Osbourne took to be a rubber bat onstage, whereupon he bit its head off only to discover that the creature was real flesh and blood. He was forced to seek precautionary treatment for rabies.

The following month, he was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, after urinating on the Alamo cenotaph. As a police officer remarked, “Son, when you piss on the Alamo, you piss on the state of Texas.” Osbourne was banned from performing in the city until 1992, when he made a public apology and donated $10,000 to maintaining the monument. In March 1982, Rhoads was killed in Florida while joyriding in a Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft, which crashed.

The albums Bark at the Moon (1983), The Ultimate Sin (1986) and No Rest for the Wicked (1988) carried Osbourne through the 1980s on a surging tide of sales, but controversy was never far away. In 1986 he was sued by the parents of Daniel McCollom, who had killed himself while listening to Blizzard of Ozz; the parents contended that the song Suicide Solution was a “proximate cause” of his death. The case was dismissed in 1988, but Osbourne was then sued by the parents of another young man, Michael Waller, who alleged that their son too was driven to kill himself by hidden messages in the song. Again, the suit was dismissed.

In 1989 Osbourne was arrested for attempted murder after trying to strangle Sharon while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This caused him to spend six months in rehab. After he recorded the album No More Tears (1991), he announced that the tour to promote it (he called it No More Tours) would be his last before he retired. The album contained Osbourne’s only Top 40 solo hit single in the US, Mama, I’m Coming Home. The song was addressed to Sharon, from whom he was temporarily estranged.

Recordings from the tour were released as Live & Loud (1993), which included many of his best-known songs, with the other members of Black Sabbath joining Osbourne for the track Black Sabbath. Live & Loud was intended to bring the curtain down on his career, and the track I Don’t Want To Change The World won him a Grammy for best metal performance in 1994.

Ozzy was born John Osbourne in Aston, Birmingham. His father, Jack, did night shifts at the industrial company GEC, while his mother, Lillian (nee Unitt), worked for the motor components firm Lucas. He had three older sisters, Jean, Iris and Gillian, and two younger brothers, Paul and Tony. The family managed to squeeze into a two-bedroom home with an outside toilet in Lodge Road, Aston.

He acquired the nickname “Ozzy” at primary school, after being initially dubbed “Oz-brain”, and while his school work was hampered by dyslexia, he showed interest in music and performing when he took roles in school productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas including The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and The Mikado. Soon, the influence of the Beatles loomed large. Ozzy claimed he had originally wanted to be a plumber, then decided he wanted to be a Beatle instead.

He left school at 15 and took a variety of jobs, including trainee plumber, slaughterhouse assistant and apprentice toolmaker, and for a time worked at the same Lucas factory as his mother, where he tuned car-horns. An amateurish attempt at petty crime led to him being arrested while trying to steal a television, and he spent six weeks in Winson Green prison.

After a stint as vocalist with an R&B band called the Approach, in 1967 Osbourne was recruited by Butler to sing with his band, Rare Breed. The group imploded almost immediately, whereupon Osbourne and Butler joined Iommi and the drummer Bill Ward to form Earth. In 1969 they changed their name to Black Sabbath, after a 1963 horror film featuring Boris Karloff. With help from the Birmingham club owner Jim Simpson, who acted as their manager, the band secured a deal with Vertigo Records, which released their debut album, recorded and mixed in two days.

Osbourne’s early 1990s retirement lasted only until 1995, when he came roaring back with a new album, Ozzmosis. Though hardly a classic, this sold three million copies within 12 months, and, after his follow-up Retirement Sucks tour proved one of the biggest successes of the summer, Osbourne and Sharon created the heavy metal touring package that they dubbed Ozzfest. This became an annual event in the US, Europe and eventually Japan.

Ozzfest presented a huge array of metal, thrash and hardcore bands, from Metallica and Judas Priest to Slipknot, Slayer, System of a Down and Linkin Park. In 2004 Ozzy and Sharon presented Battle for Ozzfest on MTV, in which bands competed to be included on the 2005 bill.

In 1997 Ozzfest included a Black Sabbath reunion, after which the band recorded the live album Reunion (1998) and continued touring into 1999, appearing again at Ozzfest. A mooted new Black Sabbath studio album was put on hold while Osbourne completed a solo album, Down to Earth (2001).

It was now that his career took its surprising lurch into TV. Following an appearance on MTV’s reality show Cribs, about celebrity homes, the Osbourne family were recruited for their own series, The Osbournes, which ran for three years from 2002. Featuring Ozzy and Sharon with their children Jack and Kelly – their elder daughter Aimee hated the idea and opted out – it resembled a surreal, outlandish sitcom liberally spattered with X-rated language, and became one of MTV’s greatest successes. He was back on TV in 2016 with Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour, which ran for three series, with Kelly joining her father and brother for the third in 2018.

In 2003 Ozzy almost died after crashing his quad bike at his estate in Buckinghamshire. While he was in hospital he topped the UK singles charts for the first time with Changes, a Black Sabbath song he had re-recorded as a duet with Kelly.

In 2005 he was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame as both solo artist and member of Black Sabbath, and the following year into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Black Sabbath. An album of cover versions, Under Cover (2005), was received unenthusiastically, but he was back to chartbusting ways with Black Rain (2007) and Scream (2010). The long-awaited Black Sabbath studio album, 13, finally appeared in 2013. Memoirs of a Madman (2014) was a compilation of the best of Osbourne’s solo work. In 2015 he received the Ivor Novello award for lifetime achievement at a ceremony in London.

In 2016, Black Sabbath, including Ozzy, embarked on a year-long world tour, billed as the group’s swansong. However, it was overshadowed by further Osbourne family dramas. In May, news broke that Ozzy had moved out of the family home after 34 years of marriage. It emerged that he had been having a four-year relationship with Michelle Pugh, a hair stylist, and was being treated for sex addiction. Ozzy made a public apology, saying that he was undergoing “intense therapy”.

In 2019, he was forced to postpone his No More Tours 2 concerts in Europe after being hospitalised with a respiratory infection. He was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, though this was not made public until 2020 (in 2005 he had been diagnosed with Parkin syndrome, a genetic condition which causes symptoms similar to Parkinson’s).

In September 2019 he reached No 8 on the US singles charts with his performance on Post Malone’s Take What You Want, his first entry into the Top 10 since 1989. He released a well-received new solo album, Ordinary Man (2020), but cancelled planned north American shows to enable him to undergo treatment for Parkinson’s in Switzerland. In 2022 he released his 13th solo album, Patient Number 9.

Earlier this month he gave his concert farewell at Villa Park, Birmingham as the finale of a day of metal music. A short set of solo songs was followed by another with his original Black Sabbath bandmates Iommi, Butler and Ward, ending with Paranoid.

In 1971 he married Thelma Riley, and they had three children, Jessica, Louis and Elliot. Shortly after their divorce in 1982 he married Sharon. She survives him, along with the three children from each marriage.

• Ozzy (John Michael) Osbourne, singer and songwriter, born 3 December 1948; died 22 July 2025