Late Friends actor Matthew Perry attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Ozzy Osbourne’s house.
Osbourne makes the revelation in his new, posthumously published memoir Last Rites, which came out on Tuesday (October 7). In an extract published by US Weekly, the Prince Of Darkness remembers Perry as “the funniest, most talented bloke”.
“He used to come to our house for AA meetings, or so my wife tells me,” the singer writes. “The funniest, most talented bloke. And he was trying so hard to stay on the right path.”
Perry spoke many times about his issues with substance addiction before he passed away in October 2023, aged 54. His death was attributed to the effects of ketamine, as well as drowning and coronary heart disease. Osbourne writes about his response to Perry’s passing in his memoir.
“Then one day he listened to his addiction telling him it was OK to get loaded, and that was it – game over,” he says. “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.”
Osbourne also wrestled with substance addictions during his life, but by the time of his death at the age of 76 this July, he was clean and sober. In Last Rites, he says that 2012 was the last time he “fell off the wagon”.
Osbourne’s death was attributed to a heart attack, which he suffered at his home in Buckinghamshire. In the final chapter of Last Rites, written shortly before the singer passed away, he admits that he had potentially serious heart problems, including a blocked valve and arrhythmia. The conditions were caused by sepsis that Osbourne contracted after undergoing his last procedure in a series of spinal surgeries in 2023.
“The valve is 80 percent blocked, apparently,” Osbourne writes. “The sepsis also gave me something called arrhythmia – when your heart can’t keep time, like a drummer in a bad pub band – so cheers for that.”
Last Rites centres around the final years of Osbourne’s life, a period also covered by two new documentaries. On October 2, the BBC aired Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home: a one-hour programme about the couple’s move from the USA back to their native UK. On October 7, the two-hour film Ozzy: No Escape From Now was released via Paramount Plus.
