George Harrison

George Harrison was born in Liverpool on Feb. 25, 1943, the youngest of Harold and Louise French Harrison's four children. His father drove the bus that took him and Paul, who was a year older, to the Liverpool Institute, a secondary school. By October 1959, he threw in his lot with the Quarry Men, which John Lennon renamed the Beatles in 1960. At the end of 1965, Mr. Harrison used a sitar on a Beatles album for the first time, and soon he was studying the instrument formally with Ravi Shankar. To put his studies to practical use, Mr. Harrison began writing songs in an Indian style and inviting Indian musicians to Beatles' sessions to help record them. The first of these was ''Love You to,'' on the 1966 ''Revolver'' album. ''Within You Without You,'' Mr. Harrison's lushly orchestrated contribution to ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,'' took this influence farther. He forged musical relationships outside the Beatles, notably with Eric Clapton, who had played the solo on Mr. Harrison's ''While My Guitar Gently Weeps.'' A sideline career as a film producer was more successful. When the Monty Python comedy troupe needed financial backing for ''The Life of Brian'' in 1978, Mr. Harrison underwrote the film, laying the groundwork for his own production company, Handmade Films. Handmade quickly became a respected independent. Among its 27 films were ''The Long Good Friday,'' ''Mona Lisa,'' ''Time Bandits,'' ''Withnail and I'' and ''Shanghai Surprise.'' Mr. Harrison sold his interest in Handmade in 1994. He had met his first wife, Pattie Boyd, on the set of the Beatles' first film, ''A Hard Day's Night,'' and married her in 1966. Their marriage broke up in 1974, when Ms. Boyd began living with Mr. Clapton, whose hit ''Layla'' was written for her. The romance did not ruin the friendship between Mr. Harrison and Mr. Clapton: they and Ms. Boyd performed a version of the Everly Brothers' ''Bye Bye, Love'' together on Mr. Harrison's ''Dark Horse'' album, and Mr. Harrison and Mr. Clapton toured Japan together in 1991. Mr. Harrison married Olivia Arias in 1978. She and their son Dhani survive him, as do two brothers, Peter and Harry, and a sister, Louise Harrison Caldwell. In addition to battling cancer, Mr. Harrison survived a stabbing attack by a deranged intruder at Friar Park in December 1999, which resulted in a punctured lung. More recently, he was treated for lung cancer and a brain tumor and had therapy at the Staten Island University Hospital and the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center.