As the patriarch of reality TV show The Osbournes – presiding in potty-mouthed dysfunction over the family antics – he won a new generation of fans, but no one ever really doubted Ozzy Osbourne loved his family, or that they loved him.

That affection was reflected in the statement released to mark his death earlier this week, 17 days after the Black Sabbath frontman’s farewell concert in his home city of Birmingham.

‘It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning,’ came the announcement. ‘He was with his family and surrounded by love.’

What was perhaps striking about the statement was whom it was credited to: Sharon, Jack, Kelly, Aimee and Louis. Sharon, of course, is Ozzy’s increasingly fragile, ever-colourful and ever-devoted wife; Jack, Kelly and Aimee are their children together.

The name Louis, however, would have been unfamiliar to many. A musician, he was the rocker’s son from his first marriage.

Two names, however, were missing from the family statement – those of Ozzy’s eldest daughter Jessica and his adopted son Elliot.

For while Ozzy might have been a trailblazer for reality TV fatherhood, he did have another wife and family first.

And save for Louis – who bears a striking resemblance to his father – his first family have maintained a silence in the wake of the 76-year-old’s death.

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Rock icon Ozzy Osbourne (right) and his first wife Thelma Riley (left) pictured at their wedding in 1971

Louis, 50, who did make a brief appearance early on in The Osbournes, was, it would seem, at his dad’s side at the family’s Grade II-listed home on the outskirts of Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire when he died.

But what of his sister Jessica, 53, who lives just six miles down the road with her husband and their three children?

As yet, she has made no public statement. Nor has there been any statement from New Zealand, where his adopted son Elliot Osbourne, 59, who works for a tech firm, lives with his wife.

Elliot was five years old when Ozzy married his mother, nightclub hostess Thelma Riley, in 1971, marking an entry into fatherhood Ozzy himself called ‘chaotic at best’.

As for Thelma, as the Mail discovered this week, despite living in Birmingham since the end of her tumultuous marriage, she has kept her association with him a closely guarded secret.

Indeed, on a peaceful street of terraced homes in Harborne, where she lived for more than two decades, it would seem even her neighbours hadn’t known she was once married to one of the city’s best-known sons.

Photographs from the 1970s show Thelma Riley (born Thelma Rees but who was married briefly to Anthony Riley) as a striking young woman with tumbling brunette hair. Now 76, she is silvery blonde but no less striking. She earned an MBA from Oxford Brookes University in 1999 and co-founded a sales and marketing consultancy.

A former neighbour Karen, who lived a few doors away until Thelma moved several years ago, remembers her being ‘always beautifully dressed’. ‘I knew her name, but we never socialised.’

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Ozzy Osbourne pictured with Louis Osbourne, his son from his first marriage to Thelma Riley

But in 2017, following the final appearance of Ozzy’s second wife Sharon on ITV’s The X Factor, Karen joked with Thelma about her shared surname, asking if she was any relation.

Karen recalls: ‘I loved The X Factor and when I bumped into Thelma in the street after Sharon’s final appearance I had a laugh with her. I didn’t really know her but cheekily asked her if they were related and she looked horrified and said, “No way, who would want to be part of that mad family!”

‘Until this day I had no idea I was a neighbour of Ozzy Osbourne’s first wife! She never let on and clearly didn’t want to.’ A short distance away, at a block of flats Thelma is understood to own and manage, one of her fellow directors tells the Mail that he too is shocked.

John Fender, an economics professor, tells the Mail: ‘I know Thelma, we are both directors of a company, but I had absolutely no idea. I am in a state of shock, she never mentioned it. She kept it very quiet. I am completely astonished. Osbourne is a fairly common name and I never put two and two together.’

She was not always so guarded, though. The Mail spoke to one former colleague who says she burned ‘red hot’ with fury in the wake of her divorce. Thelma, who is thought to have had a brief third marriage, is now happy with a long-term partner, retired and living quietly on the outskirts of Birmingham. She is very much a part of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

That she might want to draw a veil over the torment of her second marriage is not surprising. Ozzy himself spoke regretfully of his treatment of Thelma in his autobiography I Am Ozzy.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Birmingham’s Rum Runner nightclub had legendary status. And one night in 1970, Ozzy and fellow Black Sabbath member Tony Iommi, rolled in. In the cloakroom was Thelma Riley.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Ozzy, to be told Thelma was a ‘lovely gal. Brainy too. But she’s divorced and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself’.

Ozzy unsurprisingly ignored this instruction and, by his account, the night ended with him and Thelma kissing in the back seat of Tony’s Ford Cortina.

A year later they married at the Birmingham Register Office. ‘A terrible mistake,’ wrote Ozzy.

Black Sabbath were touring; drugs, booze and groupies were beckoning and Thelma, now pregnant, was home alone. ‘I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind,’ wrote Ozzy.

‘If I loved Thelma, I certainly didn’t treat her like I did. If I’ve got any regrets about my life, that’s one of them.

‘I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn’t deserve it; she wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t a bad wife. But I was a f****** nightmare.’

Ozzy’s worst excesses have been well documented.

On the home front, he once took a shotgun to the 17 cats at the couple’s home in Staffordshire.

He left a stash of cannabis-laced cake in the kitchen that was accidentally given (by Thelma) to the local vicar. And he also shot all the chickens (purchased by Thelma) with a semi-automatic gun then doused the coop with gasoline and set it on fire, finishing off the sole survivor with a sword.

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Ozzy Osbourne (pictured in September 2016) revealed his plans for his funeral before his death aged 76

In an interview with the Mail, he once admitted his abuse of Thelma was both mental and physical. ‘You name it, I did it,’ he said. ‘I hit her big time and I was a complete idiot.’

In the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, he revealed he could not remember when Louis and Jessica were born.

Louis recalled: ‘When he was around and he wasn’t [drunk], he was a great father. But that was kind of seldom, really, I just have a lot of memories of him being drunk… It’s not good for family life, really.’ Jessica made a brief appearance in the documentary, saying: ‘I don’t remember being put to bed or having a bath by Dad or anything like that. I wouldn’t say he was there for us.’

Asked if Ozzy was a good dad, she replied: ‘No.’

Ozzy’s divorce with Thelma was agonisingly drawn out – Sharon, his manager’s daughter, was already on the scene, but there was a last-ditch holiday with Thelma and the children to Barbados in 1981.

Ozzy said: ‘We got there at five o’clock and I was legless by six.’ The marriage ended the same year. Ozzy would later declare Thelma got the house and ‘every last penny I had in the bank’. He also paid for the kids’ private school. But he left scars.

His relationship with Elliot, who moved from Scotland to New Zealand around five years ago, appears to have always been strained. Ozzy wrote: ‘I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear hole. And it’s not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him.’

The year after the divorce he married Sharon. Their first child Aimee was born in 1983, followed by Kelly in 1984 and Jack in 1985.

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The rock legend died on Tuesday just weeks after he took to the stage for his final show with Black Sabbath (pictured: the final photograph of him on stage)

Kelly and Jack along with their mother were catapulted into the public consciousness, courtesy of MTV’s The Osbournes which aired from 2002 to 2005. Aimee chose to remain away from the cameras.

Louis once had an apartment in the garden of his father’s Beverly Hills home and has always spoken with pride of his dad.

He followed, to an extent, in his father’s footsteps. He dropped out of university to take a job in a record shop, before getting his big break as a DJ in Ibiza in 1998.

Even while a fledgling artist, he was determined to make it on his own, prohibiting use of his father’s name, and is now a respected DJ, producer and broadcaster.

As Ozzy told the Mail in 2014. ‘I was a bad father, an abusive husband and I had an ego the size of India. I spent decades of my life being an absolute idiot. I’ve got so many regrets I can’t even remember half of them. But wives and kids are right at the top.’

After so many years of Ozzy’s chaotic neglect, how many of his ‘first’ family will attend any memorials to the late rock star remains to be seen.