Ozzy Osbourne's final years chronicled in new films and memoir

Ozzy Osbourne made his final television appearance in a one-hour documentary that aired on October 2, and his last weeks and months are set to be further chronicled this week by a two-hour film and a posthumous memoir released October 7. The programs and book trace the Black Sabbath singer’s determination to return to the stage for a farewell concert in his hometown of Birmingham on July 5, and the cascade of medical crises that followed in the years before his death on July 22 at age 76.

The July show, billed Back to the Beginning, reunited the original Black Sabbath lineup and drew some 42,000 fans to Villa Park, with millions more watching online. Osbourne opened with a solo set before joining bandmates for a four-song Sabbath finale. He performed seated on a custom throne because spinal injuries and debilitating weakness left him unable to stand for long. “The only thing that was terribly frustrating for me, I had to sit there instead of running across the stage,” Osbourne says in the documentary, describing the nine-song solo segment as “very humbling.”

The documentary films and Last Rites, the memoir Osbourne finished days before his death, detail a prolonged period of...