Ozzy’s rocky romance to hit screens
MOVIE Ozzy and Sharon
ROCK royalty Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne are making a film about their enduring love story.
With one of the longest marriages in showbiz – 38 years– they have defied the odds to stay together despite Ozzy’s substance abuse, sex addiction and extra-marital affairs.
Ozzy, 71, who revealed this week he has battled Parkinson’s since 2003, said Sharon is leading the project. He added: “Don’t ask me anything. My family are involved and I said to my wife, good luck.”
Former X Factor judge Sharon, 67, hopes the project will focus on their relationship rather than Ozzy’s wild antics as the frontman of Black Sabbath.
She said: “Our story is a love story and it happens that he’s a musician.”
IT was the most poignant moment of the Oscars. Notoriously shy and painfully awkward, Joaquin Phoenix thanked the Academy for his Best Actor award for The Joker this week.
Then came a rare public mention of a tragedy he has spent a career trying to bury. “When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric,” the 45-year-old star muttered. “He said: ‘Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.’”
It’s a line from the aptly named song Halo, written by his older brother River Phoenix, the one-time stand-out star of their hippie family who, a year after penning the tune, was nominated for his first acting Oscar for 1987’s Running on Empty.
Just six years later, on October 31, 1993, Joaquin’s voice became infamous across America. Not because of his own burgeoning career but because every news channel was playing his desperate 911 phone call.
“It’s my brother. He’s having seizures... Please come here” the then 19-year-old could be heard pleading. “Please come, he’s dying.”
We would later learn River, then 23, was convulsing on the pavement outside Johnny Depp’s LA club The Viper Room, overdosing on a heroin and cocaine speedball handed to him by an unnamed “guitarist friend”.
The ambulance did arrive but River never came round.
Years earlier, the Phoenix family, whose real surname is Bottom, had gathered for a family photo full of wholesome hopeful smiles. But behind the happy facade is where the roots of this tragedy lie.
The image shows the young Joaquin, then nine, beaming with River, 13, parents John and Arlyn and sisters Rain, Summer and Liberty.
With textbooks scattered across the table, the shot from their LA home in 1983 gives the Phoenixes a Brady Bunch air. Yet that could not be further from the truth.
Five years earlier the family had fled Venezuela, where John and Arlyn were archbishops in the infamous religious sex cult Children of God, which has since been investigated by the New York Attorney’s Office and FBI over child sexual abuse claims. John and Arlyn were not implicated in any wrongdoing.
It was a start that some fear has haunted the children for life – leading River into drugs and Joaquin into darkness, a “self-pity” as he said in his Oscar speech, not dissimilar to that of Joker character Arthur Fleck.
Their parents became involved in the sect in 1972 – when River was two – after coming across a commune while travelling through Crockett, Texas, in their Volkswagen van.
John and Arlyn found a sense of belonging with the sect, thanks to its timely mix of Christianity and free love. They went on to run their own centre in Colorado and then into Latin America, having more children along the way (Joaquin was born in Puerto Rico in 1974). But the sect wasn’t as innocent as they first thought. Leader David Berg had begun the movement in 1968 in California – no doubt mopping up the teen hippies not already under Charles
Joaquin and fiancee Rooney Mara
Manson’s Helter Skelter spell. By 1971 it had 1,500 members and 69 colonies, including one which was home to the family of #MeToo campaigner and actress Rose McGowan.
Later that decade it would have 10,000 members, including communes in Britain. Berg preached about the importance of sexual freedom, even making it part of the sacrament. He claimed the Bible was supportive of incest and adultery, and encouraged women to have children by multiple men and men to have multiple wives, all in preparation for an apocalypse. Children