Following the news of Robin Williams’s death in 2014, the late Ozzy Osbourne and his wife, Sharon, were among the first to pay tribute to the beloved actor/comedian. While many mourned the loss of a man they only knew from the movies, the Osbournes remembered what Williams had personally done for them during a very dark time in their own lives. “I’m forever in debt to Robin Williams,” Ozzy told Dave Basner of the VH1 Radio Network at the time. “When Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer, I’d seen the film Patch Adams and…I don’t know if you ever saw that film he made. It’s about a guy who was a male nurse or something in a hospital and he was working with terminal people, and I thought, ‘What a great thing to do.’ And he’s a very funny man, Robin Williams. I got my agent to contact him and ask if he’d be so kind as to come around and talk to my wife, which he did. It was very nice of him.”
Sharon elaborated on what her visit with Williams was like during a 2002 interview with The National Enquirer. “I was in bed when he came by, half asleep and a little woozy from some of the medication the doctors had given me to take,” she explained. “Suddenly, there’s a knock on my bedroom door and I say, ‘Come in.’ And there’s Robin Williams standing in front of me! Well, I thought I must be dreaming. In fact, I thought I was hallucinating from the drugs I’d been given! I couldn’t think of what to say, so I said, ‘Does Ozzy know you’re here?’ Then, Robin got in bed with me and said, ‘Shhh! No, he doesn’t and don’t tell him!’”
It ended up being just the thing Sharon needed in that moment, according to her daughter, Kelly. “Mom was lying in this bedroom that she had curtained off. It was pitch black. She hadn’t gotten out of bed for like a week. Mom’s dog had to go to the hospital because she was dehydrated. Mom was dehydrated. And we couldn’t get her to go back to finish the chemo,” Kelly said on a 2018 podcast. “I just remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs and we went from crying, not knowing what to do, to peeing ourselves laughing because we could hear Mom upstairs in her room laughing with Robin. The next day it changed everything and Mom went back to chemo.”
Williams had never met Sharon before, but stayed there cuddling with her and telling her jokes for two hours. Looking back, she called him “one of the nicest genuine people you could ever meet.”
Sharon eventually beat the cancer despite being given a 33% survival prognosis.
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