After 11 consecutive years performing beside her brother Donny at the Flamingo in Las Vegas—a run that spanned 1,730 shows and drew more than 900,000 fans—Marie Osmond walked off the stage in November 2019 knowing her next chapter had to look different. She described herself as tired in a way that money could not fix. Just months earlier, in May 2019, CBS had given her a permanent seat on the daytime talk show The Talk. She joined a panel that included Sharon Osbourne, Sheryl Underwood, Eve, and Carrie Ann Inaba, and viewers watched her settle into the format as though she had always been there.
Behind the scenes, though, tensions quickly built. By April 2020, the friction became impossible to hide. Sharon reportedly told Marie, “You are nothing like me,” and from that point the relationship deteriorated. Insiders later told Page Six that Sharon and Sheryl threatened to leave the show unless Marie was removed, with Carrie Ann Inaba the only co-host said to be fighting to keep her.
When Marie announced her exit in August 2020, she did not escalate the conflict publicly. She thanked her producer, John Redmond, and joked that she and her husband, Steve, had not been so alone together since 1982. Instead of returning to Las Vegas for another residency, Marie took a different path. She toured with full symphony orchestras and released a classical album, Unexpected, on her own label in December 2021.
Donny opened his own solo show at Harrah’s, staying where the spotlight was brightest, while Marie chose a quieter kind of career move. Then, in 2023, she made an announcement that drew widespread attention: she said she would not leave any of her estimated $20 million fortune to her seven living children. She explained that she believes self-worth cannot be bought and wants her children to inherit her work ethic rather than her money. The decision pushed her to revisit an older wound.
At 66, she was finally ready to talk openly about what happened to her as a child. Marie was born on October 13, 1959, in Ogden, Utah, on the exact day her father, George, turned 42. Her parents saw the shared birthday as a divine sign. After eight sons, they finally had a daughter.
Growing up in that house meant living among eight older brothers, two of whom, Virl and Tom, were born deaf. The family entertainment business was built partly to fund their care. There was little privacy. By age four, in 1964, Marie was making her television debut on The Andy Williams Show.
While other children were learning to tie their shoes, she was learning camera angles. At age 11, during a commercial shoot in Japan, the boat she was filming on capsized in shark-filled waters. She swam for her life and was rescued, but producers sent her straight back to work, leaving her with severe sunburn and blistered skin. In her memoir, she described being treated more as a product than a person in some situations.
In 1975, when she was 16, Marie blacked out while driving with her mother. The crash bent the steering wheel, nearly blinded her, and threw her mother through the windshield with collapsed lungs. Alone in the hospital, terrified she had killed her mother, Marie said she had a clear vision of her late grandfather telling her not to worry. Her mother survived.
By the time she was 15, the family had landed ABC’s Donny and Marie variety show. To viewers, it looked magical. Behind the curtain, Marie worked 18-hour days, memorizing about 350 pages of script every two and a half days. Then came a moment she says broke something inside her.
Marie revealed that a studio executive pulled her aside in a parking lot and told her she was an embarrassment. Standing 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 103 pounds, she said the grown man told her she was fat and that 250 people would lose their jobs because she could not stop eating. From that day on, she starved herself for three days before every taping, surviving only on lemon water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. Her weight dropped to 92 pounds.
She also recalled that comedian Groucho Marx, while in a wheelchair, inappropriately pinched her behind on set. Standing next to icons like Cher and Farrah Fawcett, she felt like an ugly duckling. Her refuge was Lucille Ball, who took Marie under her wing, playing Scrabble for hours and mentoring her through a male-dominated industry. In 1978, Marie was offered the role of Sandy in Grease.
She turned it down because the character felt too edgy, and she disliked the message that a woman had to change her values to win a man’s attention. Olivia Newton-John took the role, and it became cinema history, but Marie said she never regretted her choice. For nearly 40 years, Marie kept her deepest pain private. Her brothers, friends, and husbands did not know.
In her 2001 book, Behind the Smile, she finally confessed that she had been abused multiple times by multiple people. The abusers were not family members. They were people her parents trusted in environments thought to be safe. Threatened into silence, Marie said she feared that speaking out would ruin her family’s business and harm her brothers.
In 2018, she told Dr. Oz that her abusers had finally passed away. In October 2019, while on The Talk, Marie shared a profound realization. She admitted that at age 8, she genuinely believed she was gay.
She clarified that it was not her orientation; the abuse had made her so terrified of men that she could not imagine wanting them near her. What healed her, she said, was family. Watching her father love her mother, and watching her eight brothers protect and treat her with gentleness, slowly changed what she believed a man could be. At 66, she chose to describe the abusers’ playbook, men using proximity to parents as a shield, which gave thousands of survivors permission to speak out.
In 1999, Marie gave birth to her seventh child, Matthew, and was hit by severe postpartum depression. She found herself collapsing in her closet, staring down what felt like a sealed tunnel. One day, she handed her nanny her bank card and blank checks, got into her car, and drove 200 miles up the California coast just to survive the mental darkness. Her marriage to Brian Blosil was already fracturing.
A 2005 house fire deepened their emotional distance, and in 2007 they finalized their divorce after 21 years. That same era brought intense tabloid scrutiny, including false reports of a suicide attempt when she said she was actually having a bad reaction to medication. Hoping to rebuild, she joined Dancing with the Stars in 2007 after her son Stephen Jr. warned her she needed to prioritize her health.
She danced her way to third place and famously fainted on live television, only to open her eyes and joke, “Oh, crap. ”
The success led to the 11-year residency with Donny at the Flamingo. But 2009 brought fresh heartbreak. She fired her manager of 35 years, Karl Engemann, resulting in a bitter legal battle.
That same year, her daughter Jessica came out as gay. Defying rigid expectations, Marie fiercely supported her and later walked her down the aisle in 2019. Then came February 26, 2010. Her 18-year-old son, Michael, who was battling severe depression, took his own life.
He left a note saying he felt he had no friends. Marie missed his final phone call while she was on stage in Vegas. Two weeks after his funeral, despite public criticism, Marie went back on stage. She said the stage was her safe place, and she needed to show her remaining children that you keep living even when it feels impossible.
Healing came in May 2011, when she remarried her first husband, Stephen Craig, wearing the exact same wedding dress from their 1982 wedding. On January 1, 2025, her brother Wayne suffered a massive stroke and died at 73. He had survived brain tumors, radiation, and previous strokes for 30 years. A few weeks before his death, Marie had followed a quiet intuition to drive out and visit him.
Because she listened to that feeling, she got to spend precious hours talking with her brother one last time. Today, Marie Osmond continues to tour, defend her faith, and help raise billions for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. She has survived 17 tumor removals, buried her son, parents, and brother, and stands firm in her choice to leave her fortune to charity rather than her children, ensuring they inherit her work ethic instead.
