Olivia Harrison

• 1. Introduction

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  Olivia Harrison was already being described in newspaper headlines as the woman who saved a former Beatle's life before most readers could place her name. On the 30th of December 1999, a man broke into Friar Park, the Henley-on-Thames home she shared with her husband, George Harrison. He later told police he was carrying out a mission sent by God, and that the Beatles were witches. George went downstairs to check a noise and was stabbed repeatedly. The intruder then turned on Olivia. The story ran on front pages around the world the next day.

  That night was really just one moment in a much longer life. It had carried her from a record company job in Los Angeles into the inner circle of one of the world's most famous bands. What shaped a young record company employee into someone who could fight off an armed man without hesitation? What did she do afterward with the music, the films, and the causes she inherited once the world's attention moved on?

  The answers start decades earlier, in a Mexican-American household in California.

• 2. From Guanajuato to Dark Horse

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  Olivia Trinidad Arias was born in Los Angeles on the 18th of May 1948. Her father, Zeke, ran a dry cleaning business. Her mother, Mary Louise, worked as a seamstress. Her siblings were Peter and Louise. Her grandparents had grown up in Guanajuato, in central Mexico, before migrating to California. She grew up in a Spanish-speaking, Mexican household in Los Angeles. In a 2016 interview, she recalled that Mexican music and film were a constant presence in her childhood. Her father had been a singer and guitarist himself. Among the artists she named as favorites were Jorge Negrete, Trío Calaveras, and Trío Los Panchos. Her family later moved west to Hawthorne, where she attended Hawthorne High School during the 1960s.

  In 1972, she started working for A&M Records, on a site in Hollywood once occupied by Charlie Chaplin's film studio. By 1974, working on the label's marketing side, she began speaking regularly by long-distance phone with George Harrison. His new label, Dark Horse Records, was distributed through A&M. Impressed with her, Harrison arranged for her to work exclusively for Dark Horse. The two met in person in October 1974 and soon became romantically involved.

  Until the late 1970s, she worked with a roster that included the sitar player Ravi Shankar. Other acts on her list included Splinter, Stairsteps, Attitudes, Keni Burke, and the guitarist Henry McCullough. The author Robert Rodriguez later described her as "a capable and even-tempered administrator, ably handling the routine chaos involved with setting up a record label and dealing with all manner of personalities."

  Before she'd even met Harrison, she had begun studying meditation under an Indian guru named Maharaj-ji, a practice that would steady the years to come.

• 3. A Steadying Presence

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  Harrison's 1976 album, Thirty Three & 1/3, carried a noticeably more contented tone than the two records before it. Many critics had found those earlier albums preachy. Their shared vegetarianism and spiritual outlook had a calming effect on him, and Arias helped curb his reliance on alcohol and other drugs. While promoting that album, she told an interviewer, "We have a nice relationship. When you strive for something higher in the next world, you have a much easier time in this one."

  On the 1st of August 1978, Arias gave birth to their son, Dhani Harrison, at the Princess Christian Nursing Home. The following month, she and George married in a private ceremony at the Henley-on-Thames Register Office in England.

  George's self-titled 1979 album included the song "Dark Sweet Lady," which he said captured the renewal Olivia had brought to his life. He wrote much of that record at their holiday home on Maui, in Hawaii. She was also a regular presence in the recording studio. The producer Giles Martin said she was often the one operating the recording button.

  Within a year, the killing of John Lennon in New York, in December 1980, would push the family toward a much more private kind of life.

• 4. Away From the Spotlight

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  Much of the early 1980s found the family dividing time between Hana, on Maui, and Hamilton Island, in north-east Australia. As the wife of a former Beatle, Olivia mostly avoided public attention during these years.

  During the late 1980s, she supported George's campaign to stop Henley's Regal Cinema from being redeveloped by the John Lewis supermarket chain. She also campaigned alongside Barbara Bach, Ringo Starr's wife, for a group called Parents for Safe Food.

  In 1989, Olivia became the target of hate mail and death threats sent to the couple's Friar Park estate. The details were kept quiet until a London police officer leaked the story to the press the following year.

  In October 1992, she wrote to The Guardian to criticize the author Geoffrey Giuliano, who had recently published a biography of George. She accused him of turning a brief acquaintance with her husband into a claimed friendship. She also objected to his description of Paul McCartney as "vacuous and shallow."

  On the 23rd of December 1999, police in Hawaii arrested a woman who had broken into the Harrisons' Maui home. One week later, during the Friar Park attack, Olivia fought off the intruder with a fireplace poker and a heavy table lamp. Local police arrived and detained him. The couple were then treated for their wounds at a hospital. In a 2005 interview, she recalled, "I remember everything about it, every millisecond. I was terrified, but it is one of those things that you just do in a heightened state of awareness so that you can never really forget any of it."

  The press reported the attack as far less serious than it actually was. The wounds to George's lung were about to shape the years that followed.

• 5. After George

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  George's injuries from the Friar Park attack were worse than the press had reported, and doctors removed part of one of his lungs. Within a year, the cancer he had beaten through treatment in 1998 returned as lung cancer. Olivia and their son, Dhani, were at his bedside when he died in Los Angeles on the 29th of November 2001. She later told the Sunday Times, "George was the funniest man I knew. When he died, I felt, oh no, the party's over. He didn't put up with any crabbiness, other than his own."

  Harrison spent a period afterward in seclusion, mourning her loss. In 2004, she alleged that a doctor named Gilbert Lederman had acted inappropriately. Lederman had treated George with experimental radiation therapy at Staten Island University Hospital. She said he had made George, while in pain and struggling mentally, listen to Lederman's young son play guitar and then sign the boy's instrument. The lawsuit also concerned Lederman's discussion of George's condition with the media. It was settled out of court, with a stipulation that the guitar be destroyed.

  After George's death, Olivia joined Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr in managing the Beatles' business affairs. She became one of the five directors of Apple Corps. In June 2006, she attended the Las Vegas launch of the Beatles' stage show Love, a project George had started through his friendship with Guy Laliberté of Cirque du Soleil. In June 2009, she appeared alongside Ono, McCartney, and Starr at Microsoft's E3 press conference to promote the video game The Beatles: Rock Band.

  About a year after George's death, in November 2002, Olivia returned to London's Royal Albert Hall to produce a tribute concert in his name.

• 6. Producing His Legacy

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  In November 2002, Olivia produced Concert for George, a tribute held at London's Royal Albert Hall and filmed by the director David Leland. The show featured Eric Clapton, Jeff Lynne, Billy Preston, Tom Petty, Prince, Ravi Shankar, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, and Dhani Harrison. All proceeds from the concert, album, film, and book went to George's charity, the Material World Foundation. Her video production for the film won the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video in 2005. She also wrote the introduction to a 2002 reissue of George's autobiography, I, Me, Mine, and authored the book Concert for George, published by Genesis Publications in 2005.

  By early 2005, Olivia was running reissues of George's catalogue from an office in London's Knightsbridge district. When in Los Angeles, she used Dark Horse's offices in Santa Monica. In 2004, she had helped Dhani compile the Dark Horse Years box set, contributing a written history of the label. She also co-produced the documentary Concert for Bangladesh Revisited, released alongside a 2005 reissue of the original Concert for Bangladesh album and film. In 2006, again with Dhani, she served as reissue producer of Living in the Material World.

  In 2007, Olivia produced the documentary included in The Traveling Wilburys Collection box set. In 2010, she was compilation producer of Collaborations, a box set of George's work with Ravi Shankar. She called it "a labor of love for me." She designed its packaging with Drew Lorimer and oversaw the restoration of long-lost footage from a 1974 Music Festival from India performance at the Royal Albert Hall.

  Olivia then co-produced Martin Scorsese's documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, released in 2011. She appeared with Scorsese at Cannes in 2010 and in New York in the summer of 2011 to promote it. In a radio interview with Leonard Lopate for WNYC, she said the film had taken five years to make. She added that it was a project George had wanted to make himself, after working on the Beatles Anthology series in the mid-1990s. She also wrote the accompanying book, published by Abrams. The film won two awards at the 2012 Emmys, recognizing Olivia and her fellow producers for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.

  For a 2014 reissue of George's Apple Records solo albums, overseen by Dhani, Olivia directed a seven-minute film called The Apple Years. It was included in the eight-disc box set of the same name. In February 2017, Genesis published her revised edition of I, Me, Mine, subtitled The Extended Edition. For it, she searched out George's handwritten lyrics and notes for songs left out of the 1980 original. She told Rolling Stone, "I have an overdeveloped sense of duty. It obviously means everything to me."

  Through the Material World Foundation, Olivia began funding film preservation work by Martin Scorsese's nonprofit, the Film Foundation. She first restored short films by Charlie Chaplin, then turned to works from Mexico's "Golden Age" of cinema. One of three Mexican titles restored by mid-2018, Emilio Fernández's 1946 film Enamorada, was presented by Scorsese at that year's Cannes Film Festival.

  In 2021, Olivia produced The Beatles: Get Back alongside the surviving Beatles and Yoko Ono. She won her second Emmy, this time in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series category; the documentary went on to win five Emmys in total. In 2022, she won a second Grammy as a producer of a reissued limited edition of All Things Must Pass. That June, she published a poetic memoir, Came the Lightening, inspired by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Long before any of these releases, in 1990, Olivia had already stepped into a very different kind of project: raising money for children she had never met.

• 7. Philanthropy and Foundations

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  In early April 1990, Olivia traveled to Romania and described what she saw as "overwhelmed, devastated and shocked." The fall of the country's Communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, had left around 100,000 children abandoned in orphanages. That same month, she founded the Romanian Angel Appeal. She enlisted the other Beatles' wives, Barbara Bach, Linda McCartney, and Yoko Ono, to help. George promoted the appeal on British television and radio. With his Traveling Wilburys bandmates, he recorded a cover of "Nobody's Child" to raise funds.

  In May 1990, ten trucks carrying food, medical supplies, and clothing, along with 32 aid workers, were sent to Romania. Olivia later said that all the money raised went directly to the children. She and the appeal's other founders covered the administrative costs themselves. In September 2000, she and George met with local representatives in Romania to check on orphanage sanitation and staffing programs the appeal had funded.

  George established the Material World Foundation in 1973, "to sponsor diverse forms of artistic expression and to encourage the exploration of alternative life views and philosophies." Olivia remains one of its directors, alongside the Harrison Family Foundation. In 2002, the Material World Foundation launched the Harrison Family Scholarship. It funds study at Brown University in the United States, with preference given to students from outside America, particularly India and Mexico.

  In late 2005, alongside a reissue of the album and film from the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, Olivia established the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF. It was initially focused on programs in Bangladesh. By July 2015, the fund had also helped children in Brazil, India, Angola, Romania, the Horn of Africa, Burma, and Nepal. These were children affected by conflict, disaster, or poverty. In September 2017, following earthquakes in Mexico, Olivia contributed to the actress Salma Hayek's UNICEF campaign. She pledged to double the next $200,000 donated to it.

  One of the fund's projects introduced floating schools, letting children in flood-prone parts of Bangladesh keep attending class through the seasonal rains. Olivia visited Bangladesh in February 2011 to check on that work. In 2015, she helped promote UNICEF's Kid Power program for children worldwide.