Marie Osmond received the kind of late-night phone call no parent ever expects when her 18-year-old son died by suicide in Los Angeles on February 26, 2010. The loss devastated the entertainer, who had spent her entire life performing in front of millions, but it also forced into public view a private reality that had been accumulating for years behind her wholesome image. Osmond was born Olive Marie Osmond on October 13, 1959, in Ogden, Utah. She was the only daughter among nine children in a devout Latter-day Saint household, and the only one who had not originally been part of the Osmond Brothers singing group that made her older siblings household names while she was still a small child.
Two of her brothers, Verl and Tom, were born with significant hearing impairments and also did not perform with the group, meaning the line between the famous performing siblings and the rest of the family was drawn clearly and early. Marie broke through on her own terms in 1973 at just 13 years old with the release of her single “Paper Roses. ” The country song reached the top of the charts and made her the youngest female artist to do so up to that point. By 1976, she and her brother Donnie were co-hosting their own weekly variety show, which ran for three years and cemented both siblings as household names across the country.
Behind that early fame, her personal life grew considerably more complicated than her public image suggested. She married three times across her adult life, twice to the same man, and became mother to eight children in total: three biological and five adopted, assembled across two separate marriages and nearly two decades. Her first child, Steven James Craig, was born on April 20, 1983, in Provo, Utah, roughly a year after she married Steven Lyall Craig, a former Brigham Young University basketball player. Marie was just 22 at the time.
The demands of her career placed considerable strain on the marriage, and the couple divorced in 1985 when their son was only two, citing mental cruelty in their filing. Marie later described the period that followed in stark terms, recalling in a 2019 interview how she had suddenly found herself a single mother uncertain about how she was going to pay her rent, let alone provide for her young child. Steven briefly followed his mother into performing as a child, appearing in the 1989 film “It Nearly Wasn’t Christmas” alongside his uncle Wayne Osmond, but never pursued acting seriously. He gravitated toward music and built a private adult life away from the industry, marrying a woman named Clare and raising three children of his own.
In 1986, just a year after her divorce from Steve Craig, Marie married music producer Brian Blosil. Brian adopted young Steven shortly after the wedding, and the couple almost immediately began expanding their household, first through adoption and then through biological children as well. Their first child together was Jessica Marie Blosil, born on December 17, 1987, and adopted in 1989 when she was nearly two. Nothing has ever been publicly disclosed regarding Jessica’s biological parents, a privacy the family has consistently maintained across the decades.
In August of 1989, Marie gave birth to Rachel, her first biological child with Brian. The family continued expanding at a remarkable pace: Michael Brian Blosil was adopted as an infant, born on May 4, 1991. Brandon was born on November 24, 1996, also adopted as an infant. Brianna Patricia Blosil arrived in November 1997, also adopted as a baby.
Matthew Richard Blosil, Marie’s third and final biological child, was born on July 6, 1999. Finally, Abigail Olive May Blosil, the youngest of all eight, was born on September 5, 2002, and likewise adopted as an infant. Marie has spoken over the years about the logistics of raising a household that size, describing the constant scheduling, the enormous grocery requirements, and the genuine effort required to ensure each child received meaningful personal attention. She has repeatedly said she refused to draw any distinction between her biological and adopted children, once remarking that she genuinely could not remember which of her children were adopted and which were not.
Behind that carefully maintained exterior, the marriage was deteriorating. Marie and Brian separated in 2007 after roughly 21 years of marriage, with their divorce finalized the following year. Marie has since described the marriage as unhealthy and acknowledged that it had been her own children who encouraged her to leave. The youngest child, Abigail, was just five when her parents separated, while the eldest, Steven, was already an adult, meaning the family essentially contained two separate generations of children experiencing the separation in completely different ways.
During this same period, her professional career was undergoing a major revival. She and Donnie launched a Las Vegas residency at the Flamingo in 2008 that would run for more than 11 years and become one of the most successful and longest-running residencies in the city’s history. She also competed on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2007, reaching the finals, a run that included a widely discussed moment when she briefly fainted on live television, which Marie attributed to exhaustion and the physical demands of the competition. Michael Blosil, Marie’s adopted son, had reportedly struggled with depression for a considerable period before his death.
The family had been aware of his difficulties and had sought help for him, with treatment during earlier stretches of his adolescence. He was attending art school in Los Angeles at the time, having moved there from Utah to pursue his creative interests. Marie has since spoken about her grief with a candor many observers found moving. She has described losing a child as something that permanently reshapes a parent, explaining that grief of that magnitude never truly resolves but instead becomes something a person learns gradually and imperfectly to carry alongside the rest of their life.
She returned to her Las Vegas stage within weeks of Michael’s death, a choice she later explained as driven partly by her need for structure and purpose and partly by her belief that Michael himself would have wanted her to continue performing. The family held a private funeral service in Utah. In the years that followed, Marie also spoke publicly about her own earlier struggles with postpartum depression following the birth of one of her children during the 1990s, a subject she had first addressed in a book published in 2001. That book helped open public conversation around the subject at a time when postpartum depression was considerably less openly discussed than it is today.
She has since become an advocate for mental health awareness, speaking openly about depression and the importance of families recognizing warning signs. Among her seven surviving children, Jessica took a professional path furthest removed from her mother’s entertainment career. She joined the Provo City Police Department in Utah, working as a police officer in the same community where the Osmond family had deep roots, before moving into counseling work specializing in helping people struggling with substance addiction. Marie has spoken about her daughter’s work with evident pride.
Jessica also came out publicly as bisexual in 2009, and in June of 2019 she married her longtime partner, Sara. Marie flew in to attend the wedding and shared a photograph on social media, publicly congratulating her daughter and her new wife. The support drew considerable positive attention given the family’s long-standing religious affiliations. Rachel, born August 19, 1989, was Marie’s first biological child with Brian and, by Marie’s own description, the child whose personality most closely resembles her own.
Rather than performing, she built a career behind the scenes as a costume designer and hair stylist. She married Gabriel Krueger on Christmas Day in 2013 following a remarkably short engagement of just 10 days, and the couple have since had two children, a daughter and a son named Rocket Jade and Wolf. Brandon Blosil, adopted as an infant, has pursued music as his primary professional interest while maintaining a considerably lower public profile than his mother or uncle Donnie ever did. Brianna Blosil built a career as a professional makeup artist, which has occasionally brought her into direct professional collaboration with her own mother, including during Marie’s tenure as a host on the daytime program “The Talk” and portions of her Las Vegas residency.
Brianna married cinematographer David Schweppe in 2018, and the couple have since had daughters of their own named Maude and Mabel. Matthew Richard Blosil, born July 6, 1999, is Marie’s third and final biological child and the one who has most directly followed the family’s religious traditions into his own adult life. Shortly after graduating from high school in 2018, he departed for a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving in Michigan before returning home in January of 2020. He is also a saxophonist, maintaining the musical thread that runs throughout the extended Osmond family.
Abigail Olive May Blosil, the youngest of all eight, was just five when her parents separated, meaning she has essentially no memory of her family’s earlier structure. She was nine when her mother remarried, and she graduated from high school in 2020. Of all eight children, she has maintained perhaps the most consistently private profile. In one of the more unexpected developments in the family’s history, Marie remarried her first husband, Steven Lyall Craig, in May of 2011, more than two decades after their original divorce had been finalized.
The ceremony was held at the Las Vegas Temple. The remarriage came just over a year after Michael’s death, and Steve had remained a consistent presence in Marie’s life throughout the intervening decades primarily through their shared son. Marie has described the unusual experience of finding her way back to the same person she had married as a young woman decades earlier. In 2020, Marie generated significant public attention when she stated publicly that she did not intend to leave her considerable fortune to her children, explaining that she believed inherited wealth would ultimately do them more harm than good, and that she intended instead to direct her estate toward charitable causes.
She has been a long-standing supporter of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, an organization she co-founded in 1983 alongside her brother and several others, which has since raised billions of dollars for pediatric hospitals across North America. She clarified that her children had been raised to work and to build their own success rather than to expect any financial windfall, and that all of them had been informed of her intentions directly. Her children have largely built exactly the kind of independent professional lives her philosophy envisioned, working across fields ranging from law enforcement and counseling to costume design, makeup artistry, and music. None of them have attempted to build careers primarily on the strength of their famous surname.
Marie’s professional life has continued well beyond the Las Vegas years. The residency with Donnie concluded in November of 2019 after more than 11 years and roughly 1,600 performances. She spent a season as a co-host on “The Talk,” launched a successful weight loss and wellness venture, and has continued touring and recording into her 60s. In 2023, she marked the 50th anniversary of “Paper Roses,” a milestone that placed her among a very small number of American performers whose careers have spanned five full decades of continuous public work.
Today, her children are spread across a range of professions and living arrangements, raising her grandchildren and pursuing careers that owe little to the famous surname they all carry. Marie has spoken far more openly about mental health in the years since Michael’s death than she ever did before it, using her platform to encourage families to recognize warning signs and seek help early.