Sharon Osbourne

Sharon Osbourne is an English-American TV personality, music manager, and businesswoman whose four-decade career has been most-defined by her management of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne (her husband since 1982) and her seven-season role as a judge on Britain's The X Factor (2004–2017). She was born Sharon Rachel Levy on October 9, 1952, in Brixton, London, England, into the Don Arden music-management family — her father Don Arden was a Manchester-based music manager known as the "Al Capone of pop."

Her 1979 hire as Ozzy Osbourne's manager — at the point when Ozzy had been fired from Black Sabbath in April 1979 — produced the Sharon-Ozzy management partnership that has continuously continued for over 45 years. Her role in relaunching Ozzy's solo career — including the 1980 album Blizzard of Ozz and the 1981 album Diary of a Madman — established her as one of the American rock-music managers of the 1980s.

The 1996 founding of the Ozzfest touring music festival (which she organized and produced through 18 years) shaped American heavy-metal touring culture. The 2002 launch of MTV's The Osbournes — the 52-episode reality TV show featuring the Osbourne family (Sharon, Ozzy, daughters Aimee and Kelly, and son Jack) — became one of the American reality-TV shows of the early 2000s and launched her American TV-personality career.

Her 2004–2017 tenure as a judge on Britain's The X Factor (alongside Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, and rotating third judges) was complicated by her three departures and three returns across the show's run. Her 2003 American TV daytime talk show The Sharon Osbourne Show ran for one season. She was complicated by 2021 controversies on CBS's The Talk — for which she was dismissed in March 2021. She has been continuously visible across British and American TV in subsequent decades.

Her name Sharon is from the Hebrew Sharon meaning "plain" or "flat country" — referring to the Sharon Plain region of central Israel. Sharon has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for over half a century.