Ozzy Osbourne was notorious for partying hard in his youth, but the rocker got sober before his death — and occasionally crossed paths with other sober celebrities.
In the posthumous memoir, Last Rites, Osbourne revealed that he crossed paths with Matthew Perry while the latter was in AA. “He used to come to our house for AA meetings, or so my wife tells me,” Osbourne wrote in the book, which hit shelves Tuesday, October 7. “The funniest, most talented bloke. And he was trying so hard to stay on the right path.”
Osbourne, who died of a heart attack in July at age 76, went on to note that he was heartbroken by Perry’s death. The Friends alum died of an accidental ketamine overdose at age 54 in October 2023.
“Then one day he listened to his addiction telling him it was OK to get loaded, and that was it — game over,” the Grammy winner wrote. “I felt so sad when they said he’d been found in his hot tub, unresponsive, with ketamine in his system. He’d given everything he had to stay clean. But it wasn’t enough.”
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While Osbourne was sober before his death, he had difficulty staying clean over the years. In the book, he described 2012 as the year he last “fell off the wagon.” After his wife, Sharon Osbourne, “busted” him and sold the cars he’d bought during his bender, he attended 90 meetings in 90 days at the AA Log Cabin in West Hollywood.
“It helped me, all that AA stuff,” he recalled. “Got me started on the way back to being sober. If you’re on your own, the voice in your head is too persuasive.”
After that, Ozzy thought he might be ready to “break free” from his “addictive personality” and try ketamine treatment with help from a doctor after Sharon, now 72, had tried it.
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“They started me on this tiny dose. A microdose, they call it,” he recalled. “But the second I felt it kick in — a very small but unmistakable altering of the mind — I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could have some serious fun with this.’”
Ozzy said he “recognized it immediately for what it was” and never tried ketamine again. “For the first time in years, I was able to be really honest with myself,” he added. “When I walked out of that ketamine clinic, I told myself I’d never let addiction steal my spirit from me again.”
Before his death, Perry had also gotten sober, which he wrote about in his own memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. On the one-year anniversary of his death, his stepfather, Keith Morrison, said he believed his stepson had his ketamine use under control.
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“Though he had been treated with ketamine, it hadn’t turned into something that he couldn’t control,” Morrison, 78, said on the Today show in October 2024. “Although, he was a guy who would make decisions. ‘I can handle this. I can do this. I can tell you what’s right. I know the whole system inside and out. I know what the drug will do to me.’ So, there was the worry [of like], ‘What’s he really doing?’”
Perry’s half-sister, Madeleine Morrison, added, “I don’t even know if in his mind, he had relapsed.”
Last Rites is out now.
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