Biography
She is the daughter of dry-cleaner Esiquiel Arias and his wife Mary Louise, who worked as a seamstress. She has brothers named Ron and Gilbert and sisters named Chris and Linda. Olivia attended Hawthorne High School in Southern California and graduated in 1965. She later worked as a secretary at A&M Records, where George Harrison happened to hold a recording contract. They were married in a private ceremony in 1978 at the Henley-on-Thames Register Office in England. Her parents attended; Harrison's brothers at his home Friar Park were not invited. Olivia attended Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach's wedding in 1981 without her wedding ring, giving rise to mistaken speculation that her marriage to Harrison was a hoax. Harrison always referred to her by her maiden name, Arias, on all his original albums and even named her "my wife Arias" in a Musician Magazine article, circa 1991.
In 1999, Olivia saved her husband's life when an intruder in the Harrison home attacked him. A mentally ill man, 36-year-old Michael Abram, had broken in, believing that George was possessed by the devil. Olivia fended off Harrison's assailant nearly single-handedly, after George had been stabbed repeatedly. She subdued him by using a fireplace poker and a lamp to bludgeon him. Harrison received a fax from his close friend Tom Petty that read: "Aren't you glad you married a Mexican girl?"
Read more about this topic: Olivia Harrison
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“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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