Music manager-turned-media darling Sharon Osbourne — the wife of heavy metal guru Ozzy_Osbourne — first sailed into prominence in 2002, as one of the four stars of MTV’s reality series The_Osbournes. This program took viewers behind-the-scenes for a raw and blackly humorous glimpse of the titular family’s daily life, with son Jack and daughter Kelly ever-present. Unsurprisingly, it turned into an instant blockbuster, scoring mile-high ratings — some of the highest in the channel’s history.
Sharon and Ozzy_Osbourne first met in the late ’70s, when Sharon took on her shoulders the task of managing the ex-Black_Sabbath frontman’s music career pending his own decision to go solo. In seemingly no time at all, she helped him maintain, and build on, his superstardom — and did the same for numerous other up-and-coming rock celebrities through the late ’90s. The MTV program, of course, represented Sharon’s most visible trip into the limelight up through that time. When it wrapped in 2006 (at the end of its fourth season), Sharon — who endured and emerged victorious from a very public battle with colon cancer — moved on to other filmed projects. These included hosting her own short-lived talk program, The_Sharon_Osbourne_Show, and serving as a judge on the talent-search-themed reality series The X Factor and America’s_Got_Talent. Cinematically, Osbourne voiced one of the characters in the CG-animated outing Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006) and tackled a live-action role in the teen comedy It’s a Boy Girl Thing (2006). Nathan Southern, Rovi
