Ozzy Osbourne shared more in common with Matthew Perry than fans might have realised.
In his posthumous memoir Last Rites, released Tuesday, October 7, the late Prince of Darkness revealed that the Friends star attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at his home while working on his sobriety, as reported by US Weekly.
“He used to come to our house for AA meetings, or so my wife tells me,”wrote Osbourne, who also publicly struggled with addiction for decades. “The funniest, most talented bloke. And he was trying so hard to stay on the right path.”
The rock legend, who died of a heart attack in July at age 76, expressed deep sadness over Perry’s death nearly a year earlier.
“Then one day he listened to his addiction telling him it was OK to get loaded, and that was it — game over,” Osbourne wrote. “He’d given everything he had to stay clean. But it wasn’t enough.”
Osbourne’s own last relapse was in 2012. After being “busted” by wife Sharon, he threw himself into recovery again — attending 90 meetings in 90 days.
He later tried a doctor-supervised microdose of ketamine but immediately recognised the danger. “For the first time in years, I was able to be really honest with myself,” he reflected. “I’d never let addiction steal my spirit from me again.”
Perry, meanwhile, wasn’t so lucky.
“Though he had been treated with ketamine, it hadn’t turned into something that he couldn’t control,” his stepfather, Keith Morrison, said on the Today show in October 2024.
Perry passed away on October 28, 2023, at the age of 54. His cause of death was determined to be accidental drowning due to the “acute effects of ketamine.”
