Stephen Rea – författare

An entertaining, heartwarming memoir detailing the adventures and valuable life lessons learned from the author’s four decades of friendship with Ozzy Osbourne and the Osbourne family. Stephen Rea was born in Northern Ireland in 1969, the same year “The Troubles” began. Violence was everywhere. His grandmother was nearly killed when gunmen opened fire on the wrong house, leaving young Stephen to pick at the bullet holes in the walls. He found refuge from this turmoil in heavy metal—especially the music of Ozzy Osbourne. As a pre-internet teenager, he hunted down dozens of live concert bootlegs—corresponding by mail with collectors around the world—and devoured every music magazine he could find. In late 1984, when Stephen was fifteen, he read about a huge festival in Rio de Janeiro that January called “Rock In Rio” whose bill included AC/DC, Queen, and Osbourne. As a lark, he mentioned it to his dad, and was stunned when he said they should go. He was even more shocked when his mother, looking for information about how to get tickets, began a correspondence with Osbourne’s secretary, who scored the family VIP passes and introduced them to Osbourne in Brazil. Thus began a friendship with Ozzy, his wife Sharon and the rest of the Osbourne family that has continued for decades. While traveling on tour in the mid-nineties, Ozzy gifted Stephen a pair of fancy leather notebooks and told him to keep a record of their adventures and conversations. The result is Ozzy & Me: a beautiful behind-the-scenes memoir that proves the life-affirming, soul-nourishing power of music—and disproves the notion that you should never meet your heroes.

An entertaining, heartwarming memoir detailing the adventures and valuable life lessons learned from the author’s four decades of friendship with Ozzy Osbourne and the Osbourne family.Stephen Rea was born in Northern Ireland in 1969, the same year “The Troubles” began. Violence was everywhere. His grandmother was nearly killed when gunmen opened fire on the wrong house, leaving young Stephen to pick at the bullet holes in the walls. He found refuge from this turmoil in heavy metal—especially the music of Ozzy Osbourne. As a pre-internet teenager, he hunted down dozens of live concert bootlegs—corresponding by mail with collectors around the world—and devoured every music magazine he could find. In late 1984, when Stephen was fifteen, he read about a huge festival in Rio de Janeiro that January called “Rock In Rio” whose bill included AC/DC, Queen, and Osbourne. As a lark, he mentioned it to his dad, and was stunned when he said they should go. He was even more shocked when his mother, looking for information about how to get tickets, began a correspondence with Osbourne’s secretary, who scored the family VIP passes and introduced them to Osbourne in Brazil. Thus began a friendship with Ozzy, his wife Sharon and the rest of the Osbourne family that has continued for decades. While traveling on tour in the mid-nineties, Ozzy gifted Stephen a pair of fancy leather notebooks and told him to keep a record of their adventures and conversations. The result is Ozzy & Me: a beautiful behind-the-scenes memoir that proves the life-affirming, soul-nourishing power of music—and disproves the notion that you should never meet your heroes.

The Shy Man’s Revenge charts Stephen Rea’s remarkable passage from a quiet, watchful boy in North Belfast to one of Ireland’s most singular actors. Growing up along the Antrim Road as the Troubles gathered force, he navigates a home riven by drink and silence, finding refuge instead in school plays, cinemas, and the charged language of performance. Rea’s story moves through Queen’s University, the ferment of civil rights activism, and the seismic cultural shifts that shaped his generation, before carrying him to London’s avant‑garde stages, the Abbey Theatre, and the founding of Field Day with Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. Told with lyricism, candour, and an actor’s instinct for the revealing detail, this memoir traces how a shy Belfast boy found his voice: onstage, in politics, and in Ireland’s ongoing argument with itself. A book of art, resistance, friendship and survival, it is Stephen Rea’s own hard‑won revenge.