Sharon Osbourne got a whole new perspective on the family she’s long avowed to have hated during Wednesday’s episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? The Talk co-host broke down during her episode of the series after learning that the women in her past lived truly tragic lives, which Osbourne said gave her a more compassionate understanding of her mother, from whom she was long estranged ahead of her death in 1999.
The X-Factor alum, 66, learned more about mother Hope Shaw, with whom she admits to having “no friendship” to the point of skipping her funeral, including that she spent the night in jail as a child after she was forced to steal to provide following her father leaving, as per The Sun.
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A 1929 newspaper clipping told Osbourne the story of her mother, 12 at the time, who took the blame for stealing stockings and other essentials alongside her grandmother Dolly Shaw, resulting in their night in jail.
Dolly, the documents revealed, was struggling to provide for her two children and aging mother without work after her husband left. It was a tough revelation for Osbourne, who put her head in her hands and said, “Oh my God. That is just heartbreaking… To have two kids, a husband gone, it must have been really hard.”
“I feel a pain in my heart looking at my mum’s little face in this photo,” she added of a photo of her mother as a child. “She’s such a sweet innocent little thing holding on to her mum really tight. …She must have had one hell of a childhood, with no father. Her mother was working, growing up and not having the comfort of your parent.”
It was a revelation for Osbourne, who added, “My heart really does break for her and it gives me a sense of why she was the way she was.”
She also learned the story of great-great grandmother Catherine, who after moving to America lost five of her six children after being “worked to death” in the horrible conditions of a cotton mill, including while she was pregnant.
“Here in America they stopped with slavery, people thought, but then they went on to bring white people from Europe over,” Osbourne said. “I never knew this part of American history. It was just heartbreaking to read this.”
She lamented, “What a terrible place to come to. You have dreams and leave one country because it’s so terribly hard there and then you think you are going to go to a better place. They give up their lives to come to another land for a better life and it’s just a horrible hell-hole.”
Photo credit: David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
