Long before the world knew him as the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne was just a boy from Birmingham — wild, uncertain, and full of dreams. And before the fame, the madness, and the music, there was Thelma.
Thelma Riley met Ozzy in the late 1960s, when she was a young schoolteacher. He wasn’t a rock god yet — just a loud, curious young man with something burning behind his eyes. “He was just Ozzy,” she remembers. “A little lost, a little loud… but kind. And mine.”
They married in 1971, just as Black Sabbath was exploding. While Ozzy toured the world, Thelma stayed home, raising their two children and trying to keep life steady. “He loved them, I believe that,” she says. “But fame doesn’t raise families. The music, the madness, the drugs — they swallowed him whole.”
She watched the man she married disappear slowly, caught between the spotlight and the shadows. “Sometimes, I’d still see him — the real Ozzy. The one who made the kids laugh, who held us like we were everything. But those moments were rare.”
Their marriage ended quietly in 1982. No drama. No headlines. Just two people who couldn’t find their way back. Ozzy would go on to become a global icon. Thelma returned to the classroom, back to a life far from the noise of rock and roll.
But even now, in her quiet moments, she still remembers. The boy from Birmingham. The whispers under the streetlights. The life that could have been.
“I loved him before the world did,” she says. “And maybe, in some forgotten way… he loved me too.”
