John DeLorean - Personal Life

Personal Life

According to his autobiography, both DeLorean and ex-wife Cristina Ferrare became born-again Christians following the entrapment controversy. DeLorean was married four times. His first marriage was to Elizabeth Higgins on September 3, 1954 and divorced in 1969. DeLorean then married Kelly Harmon, daughter of Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox and also sister of actor Mark Harmon, on May 31, 1969 and divorced in 1972. His third marriage was to model Cristina Ferrare (with whom he had a daughter on November 15, 1977), ending in divorce in 1985. He was married to Sally Baldwin until his death in 2005. DeLorean also adopted a son, Zachary, as a single father.

DeLorean's name is correctly spelled without the space, as DeLorean, the same goes for the Company. Only if the use of lower case letters was not possible (or not wanted), for instance on typewritten documents of the DeLorean Motor Company, the use of a space is correct. This appears to have been the company's chosen form. In typeset documents, a half space, not a full space, appears between the two portions, and the same is visible in more stylistic representations, as on the automobiles themselves.

DeLorean appeared in a widely published magazine advertisement for Cutty Sark whisky in the year prior to his arrest and the collapse of his company. It was captioned "One out of every 100 new businesses succeeds. Here's to those who take the odds."

In 1999, DeLorean declared personal bankruptcy after fighting over forty legal cases since the collapse of DeLorean Motor Company.