Bullies made my life hell!
It was a relationship fraught from the beginning, but Sharon Osbourne was stunned to learn of her mother’s impoverished childhood in an episode of the British show Who Do You Think You Are?
The wife of Ozzy has been open about her lack of a relationship with her mother, Hope Shaw. She didn’t even attend Hope’s 1999 funeral.
“I didn’t like my own mother at all,” she says. “I think there was an underlying love, but there was no friendship, nothing at all. We didn’t like each other.”
But in the episode, Sharon (66) finally learnt the truth of her mother’s awful childhood – she was arrested for theft at age 12 alongside Sharon’s grandmother, driven by desperation.
Hope and Dolly were kept in prison for two nights in 1929 for stealing two pairs of stockings, and Hope reportedly begged officers to let her “mummy” go if she took all the blame for the theft.
“Oh my God, this is just heartbreaking,” Sharon remarks in the episode, which hit UK screens last week. “She must have had one hell of a childhood, with no father, her mother was working… growing up and not having the comfort of your parents. My heart really does break for her. It gives me a sense of why she was the way she was.”