Getty ImagesTraditional marriage vows include pledges from each spouse to stand by the other for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, through sickness and in health, until death do they part.
Sharon Osbourne and Ozzy Osbourne have ticked off almost every box many times over, and surely there were times during the course of their 35-year relationship when they thought that the ultimate separation was imminent.
"I should be dead. I don't know why I'm not. Most of the people I used to get off my head with are dead. I've fallen down stairs, over stairs, over balconies," Ozzy told the Daily Mail two years ago. "I once jumped out of a hotel window thinking it was the ground floor, but I was two floors up. I landed in a rosebush. I didn't even get a scratch. I didn't think I'd see 40 let alone 60. There's no reason on earth I should still be alive."
Look up long-suffering in the dictionary, and there is a picture of Sharon Osbourne.
Read More: Ozzy Osbourne Looks Back: 'I Should Be Dead' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/ozzy-osbourne-should-be-dead/?trackback=tsmclip
So while the news that the Osbournes have broken up about two months shy of their 34th wedding anniversary seemed to have come out of the blue this weekend, especially coming on three-plus years of sobriety for Ozzy and considering what they've been through...
There is such a thing as a tipping point. And while Sharon may look fab at 63, having battled cancer and other ailments she may be at a point in life where she doesn't need the aggravation.
Then again, this is hardly the first time that heavy metal's first couple have taken a break from each other (Ozzy memorably howled for his wife when she walked out on him during an episode of The Osbournes), and a source has even told us that Ozzy's move away from the family homestead is currently considered temporary. Ozzy also told E! News himself that he remains clean and sober after three and a quarter years. "I have not touched drugs or alcohol in that time," he said. "Any reports that I am not sober are completely inaccurate."
But perhaps, for a change, it wasn't Ozzy's more storied demons that drove them apart.
They met in 1970, when Sharon was 18 and Ozzy was 22, as well as married with two children. Their romance began a decade later, right around the time Black Sabbath booted Ozzy because his drug use had gotten out of control, and they tied the knot on July 4, 1982. Perhaps the Paranoid artist had gotten used to having a built-in caretaker in Sharon for the majority of their marriage, someone who stood by him through the worst of times and devoted her life to him, having also been his manager for decades. So maybe the past few years of soberly watching his wife take off for work and carry on a life of her own hasn't agreed with him.
And the couple haven't just had their own issues to deal with lately either. While they've joyously watched son Jack Osbourne become a father twice over, the 30-year-old is also battling multiple sclerosis—a diagnosis that has been heartbreaking for his parents as well.
"We were more afraid than anybody. He just gets on with it," Ozzy told Eric Blair at a Rock Against MS Foundation Event in 2014, per Livewire. "He just accepts it. He didn't go, 'Oh my God! This is the end.' It must have affected him, but he seems to be handling it really, really well. Sharon and I were freaked out."
Read More: Osbournes Discuss Jack's Battle With Multiple Sclerosis | http://loudwire.com/ozzy-sharon-osbourne-son-jack-battle-multiple-sclerosis/?trackback=tsmclip
Last year, Sharon took more than a month off from The Talk to recover after collapsing from what her rep called "mental and physical fatigue." She later revealed to Howard Stern that she suffered a nervous breakdown. "Life" in general was the main cause, "and I was in the middle of negotiations for months to do this Black Sabbath tour with LiveNation...but it was just life. I couldn't take it. My head fused."
Of course concert negotiations and juggling a million things wasn't anything new for Sharon in theory, but she said the difficulties of planning a big tour for a bunch of older people who are set in their ways—on top of "life"—were just too much.
Interestingly, if she and Ozzy hadn't signed up to do a reality show 14 years ago, the reason why most people who aren't Black Sabbath fans know who the Osbournes are, she may not have had anything on her plate besides her husband's career at all.
When Sharon and Ozzy agreed to do The Osbournes for MTV in 2002, back when Jack and Kelly were just a couple of teenagers living at home, eldest daughter Aimee memorably refused to take part, somehow foreseeing how stressful it would be to be in the spotlight in a most unusual (for the time) way. The show, which helped usher in the age of rock 'n' roll families doing reality shows, was on until 2005.
"I think if we were to do it over again, we wouldn't have done the show," Sharon told Barbara Walters in late 2002, several months after being diagnosed with colon cancer.
"You know when you're sick you want to be on your own?" Sharon explained to the bewildered Walters. "And it's had a tremendous effect on Ozzy, Ozzy's been hitting the bottle again, and I can't throw up on my own...and Ozzy can't get drunk on his own." Later in the interview, Ozzy joined Sharon and wept openly with concern for his wife's then-unknown fate.
Even though The Osbournes was an almost instant phenomenon, no one could've predicted, especially during such a dark time, that the series would serve as a springboard to lasting fame for the whole family, and not just add to patriarch Ozzy's own bat-chomping legend.
When the show first started, perhaps the most striking Osbourne family quirk—aside from how much profanity the family, including Kelly and Jack, used during the course of a conversation—was Ozzy's mumbling. While it was at first written off as a result of decades of hard living, it turned out that it was a remediable affliction.
Right around the time he was seriously injured in an ATV accident in in December 2003, Ozzy revealed that it was a prescription drug cocktail given to him after Sharon's cancer diagnosis that had caused his near-incoherence.
"I was wiped out on pills," Ozzy told the Los Angeles Times. "I couldn't talk. I couldn't walk. I could barely stand up. I was lumbering about like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It got to the point where I was scared to close my eyes at night — afraid I might not wake up." Added Sharon, "Ozzy couldn't cope. He was worried I might die. He fell apart." A trip to Boston to see a specialist who weaned him off the 13-drug regimen helped return Ozzy to his more normal self.
The doctor "was absolutely flabbergasted about the kinds and amounts of medication that I was on," Ozzy told the Times. "He asked me, 'Where are you getting all these pills from?' Then he just threw everything in the trash."
While he had had loyal, rabid fans for decades, the MTV show also gave a huge commercial boost to his solo career, and after the ATV crash Ozzy and Kelly's duet cover of Black Sabbath's "Changes" shot to the top of the U.K. singles chart—Ozzy's first time on top without his band.
After The Osbournes ended, Ozzy of course continued to tour and record, reuniting with Black Sabbath in 2011, while Sharon became a judge on The X Factor and America's Got Talent. She also briefly had her own talk show and has been a co-host on The Talk since 2010.
In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN in 2011, Sharon was again asked whether she would have done anything differently as far as agreeing to do The Osbournes and how it all played out for her family."I've gone over and over the same question in my mind, you know, 'did I do the right thing,' and I honestly have to say I would do it again," she said, nine years after having the opposite answer (understandably) for Barbara Walters. "I definitely would. We had unbelievable experiences as a family that we shared. It was an amazing time in our life. Yes, bad things happened. Bad things happen anyway."
But while there were many good times, a new level of fame and riches neither erased the past for Sharon and Ozzy nor cured their marriage of what had always ailed it.
Split rumors also swirled in April 2013 and, though Sharon put them to rest, she said that her husband had relapsed and started abusing prescription drugs.
"Am I happy? No," she said frankly on The Talk. "Am I upset? Yes, I am. I'm devastated right now...It's a disease that not only hurts the person that has the disease, but it hurts the family. It hurts people who love you." But, she added insistently, "we are not divorcing."
"I would like to apologize to Sharon, my family, my friends...for this insane behavior during this period," Ozzy tweeted in acknowledging he had fallen off the wagon. And falling off the wagon, as Sharon noted, was never just about Ozzy harming himself. His legendary antics over the years were destructive in a variety of ways.
When the Mail asked in 2014 what Ozzy's biggest regret was, he admitted, "The way I treated both my wives. I was a bad father, an abusive husband and I had an ego the size of India. I spent decades of my life being an absolute idiot. I've got so many regrets I can't even remember half of them. But wives and kids are right at the top. It's pointless even saying sorry. I couldn't say it enough times. All I can do is stay sober."
And since his relapse in 2013, it appears he has done just that. It adds a hint of mystery to their current separation, but really you could pick a number of incidents from the past 34 years as being the straw that was just waiting to break the camel's back.
Meanwhile, the ups, downs and too-strange-to-believe anecdotes from their daily lives have also now been a part of the Osbournes' shtick for years.
Asked how in the world Ozzy secured his license after finally taking up driving at 63, Sharon told Conan O'Brien in 2013, "He probably gave the guy free tickets to the show, or something like that." "So now Ozzy's out there driving in Los Angeles?" Conan confirmed, to which Sharon addressed the audience, "And you should all take note. Really, he's out there." She shook her head. "He's not good."
Even when talking Ozzy's persistent substance abuse trouble on The Talk, Sharon said, "We will deal with it and this too shall pass. Otherwise, my husband will be taken to hospital to get my foot removed from his [bleep]."
Which still could very well be the reason he has moved out for the time being.