After more than 60 years in the spotlight, Donny Osmond credits his marriage and his faith with keeping him humble.
“I’m so grateful. I’ve got a strong marriage and a good foundation — my faith keeps me strong,” the “Puppy Love” singer told Fox News Digital. “I know a lot of people might say that’s kind of square, but no, I’m a God lover and I respect deity. Jesus Christ is the center of my life, and that’s what keeps my feet on the ground.
“That gives me the foundation that I have, that I can keep going in this really, really tough business. But it’s rewarding as well.”
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Osmond met his wife Debbie, now 65, when they were teenagers, and they married in 1978.
WATCH: DONNY OSMOND SAYS HIS ‘STRONG MARRIAGE’ AND FAITH KEEP HIS ‘FEET ON THE GROUND’
Osmond, 66, said he believes the key to his success for more than six decades in the business is reinvention.
“You’ve got to keep doing new things. You’ve got to go to another height, climb another mountain constantly,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, especially when you’re going from a teenybopper career to an adult or a mature entertainer. But that’s what’s so unique about my show here in Las Vegas, is that I take people through six decades of show business in 90 minutes.”
Osmond said he began singing professionally at 5 years old.
“I don’t know any other life,” the 66-year-old explained. “When you start out that young, started singing at 4, professionally at 5, it’s like there’s really nothing else I know or would want to do because, yeah, it’s a tough business. I mean, you talk to anybody in the business, it’s hard to get there. It’s hard to maintain it. But I love getting on stage, man. It’s just something, it’s in my blood. It’s in my DNA. And I like the hard work. I love challenges, and I love reinventing myself. I’m going to be adding some stuff to this show next year that will freak you out.”
But he admits he did miss out on a “normal, or whatever ‘normal’ is, a childhood that other people have.”
Osmond revealed he spoke to Michael Jackson “many, many times” about childhood stardom.
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“We had a great relationship before we lost him, about this very subject,” he said. “And he said something to me one time and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty, pretty amazing.’ He said, ‘You’re the only person on this planet that I can relate to that knows exactly what I’ve gone through in my life.’
“And I looked at him. I said, ‘You know what? The same goes for you. We understand exactly what it takes to be in the business, to start at such a young age and to just keep doing it over and over and over again.'”
Jackson died in 2009.
Osmond’s Las Vegas residency at Harrah’s, now in its fourth year, has been extended until 2025.
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“This is called the entertainment capital of the world,” he said of Las Vegas. “They say New York: If you can make it there, you make it anywhere. But this is the capital. And, I mean, everybody’s tried to replicate Vegas all around the world, but there’s only one Las Vegas. And to have my own show on the Strip and probably one of the best locations on the Strip, it’s pretty darn cool, really is.”
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Osmond said the theater at Harrah’s seats around 600.
“And the show that I designed is perfect for that type of crowd, because there’s not one bad seat in the house,” he said. “There’s a segment I do in the show called the request segment, where I put all 65 albums on the huge screen behind me, and the audience can pick any song from any album I’ve ever done in my entire life. And it changes every night, obviously, because the audience controls the show for about 20 minutes. And that’s just one of my favorite parts of the show.”
WATCH: DONNY OSMOND REVEALS ONE OF HIS FAVORITE PARTS OF HIS LAS VEGAS RESIDENCY
Osmond said after becoming a star as a teenager, it wasn’t necessarily easy to be respected as an adult performer.
“There’s a lot of roadblocks when you hit it so big as a teenybopper,” he explained, “but then you go into the ‘Donny & Marie’ show, which gave me a really, you know, cutesy, cutesy image. And it was a very powerful, very successful show. But the aftermath of that was kind of difficult to get over because it pigeonholed me to a certain thing.”
But he said he found “time has a tendency to let things remain in the past.”
WATCH: DONNY OSMOND SAYS ‘DONNY AND MARIE’ SHOW ‘PIGEONHOLED’ HIM TO ‘CUTESY’ IMAGE FOR A WHILE IN HIS CAREER
The “Why?” singer even does a tribute to his “Donny & Marie” variety show days in his Vegas show.
“It’s a tearjerker, and people come up to me all the time and say, ‘Man, that took me back to my youth, my innocent years.’ But then I give them everything else as well. … So, those hard times kind of get brushed away with time, and you embrace it.
“‘Puppy Love.’ I mean, there was a time in my life in the ‘80s I never even wanted to hear the song again. But then I grew up, and I realized, ‘You know what? It was a great song when I was 14 years old.’ It was. It got me where I am today. Embrace it, the second song in the set list, and I just, and I treat it with respect.”
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Osmond and his younger sister Marie, 64, hosted their variety show from 1976 until 1979. More recently, they did a Vegas residency together for 11 years before it ended in 2019. He said he didn’t see the two of them doing another residency together.
“Marie and I, we don’t do shows together anymore, and Marie does her touring, and I do mine,” he explained. “But I thoroughly enjoyed working with her. Yes, we kind of got on each other’s nerves, but that’s what was funny — the sibling rivalry. But the professionalism between the two of us was just second to none. We could look at each other in case of a mishap on stage, and we would know instinctively what we were supposed to do and what we were going to do. So, I miss those years. They were great years.”
WATCH: DONNY OSMOND ON WHETHER HE AND SISTER MARIE WOULD DO ANOTHER LAS VEGAS RESIDENCY TOGETHER
He added that, along with his tribute to “Donny & Marie” in his new show, he also does one for his success with the Osmond Brothers.
Looking back on his career, Osmond said he would tell his younger self, “’Don’t take yourself so seriously.’ Isn’t that what we all say when we get older? Because we’re trying so hard to climb that ladder of success in life. But then you say to yourself, ‘What success?’”
He said he doesn’t “knock what I’ve done because I worked really, really hard, especially in the ‘80s, to reinvent myself before ‘Soldier of Love’ hit. But, I look back and say, ‘Smile a little bit more, laugh a little bit more, enjoy the ride a little bit more.’”
Osmond remembered a funny story about when he was hosting “Pyramid” and Dick Clark, who had hosted the show for years, was his guest.
“When I was hosting ‘Pyramid,’ Dick Clark, that was his show for, what, 17, 18 years? He was my guest when I was the host. So, he comes, I introduce him. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Dick Clark!’ Place goes crazy. We’re talking. I’m interviewing a little bit. I said, ‘All right, let’s play the game.’ And he starts to head towards the podium. I grab him and said, ‘Not this time, buddy. It’s my show.’ It was a great moment.”
Osmond, who hosted “Pyramid” from 2002 until 2004, said the key to hosting a game show is remembering the host is “in the driver’s seat.”
“You have to keep it driving all the time and come up with funny quips all the time,” he said.
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Osmond also joked about his “horrendous” “Celebrity Family Feud” experience with his older brother Merrill, 71, this summer.
“It was worse than bad,” he laughed. “And I’m not going to take the blame for that. My brother. I’ll never ask him to do another game show with me again, because the clue was, Steve [Harvey] said, ‘What would you find in a baby’s crib that you wouldn’t find on a teenager’s bed?’ Well, you know pacifier, right?”
But, Osmond said, Merrill couldn’t remember the word. “And he didn’t get it. So, I’m going to send him about a thousand pacifiers for Christmas.”
