Olivia Harrison

Childhood and music industry career

Arias was born in Los Angeles. Her grandparents migrated to California, having grown up in Guanajuato in central Mexico. Her father Zeke was a dry cleaner, and her mother Mary Louise worked as a seamstress; her siblings include Peter and Louise. Spending her early childhood in Los Angeles, she grew up in a Mexican, Spanish-speaking environment. In a 2016 interview, she recalled that Mexican music and films were a regular part of her upbringing, with Zeke having been a singer and guitarist, and that Jorge Negrete, Trío Calaveras and Trío Los Panchos were among the artists she enjoyed. Later in her youth her family moved west to Hawthorne where she attended Hawthorne High School in the 1960s.

In 1972, she began working for A&M Records, at the former site of Charlie Chaplin Studios in Hollywood. By 1974, as a member of the marketing department, she regularly liaised by long-distance telephone with George Harrison, whose new record label, Dark Horse, was distributed by A&M. Impressed with Arias, Harrison arranged for her to work exclusively for Dark Horse Records. The pair met for the first time in October 1974 and soon became romantically involved. Until the late 1970s, Arias worked with a roster of artists that included Ravi Shankar, Splinter, Stairsteps, Attitudes, Keni Burke and Henry McCullough. According to author Robert Rodriguez, she was "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 meeting Harrison, Arias had studied meditation with the Indian guru Maharaj-ji. Their shared interest in spirituality, together with a lifestyle incorporating vegetarianism, had a calming effect on Harrison, whose reliance on alcohol and other drugs Arias helped curb. His 1976 album Thirty Three & 1/3 conveyed a more contented outlook in which he expressed his faith without the disapproving tone that, for many music critics, had marred his previous two albums. While accompanying Harrison on his promotional campaign for Thirty Three & 1/3, Arias 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."

Marriage to George Harrison

Arias gave birth to the couple's son Dhani Harrison at Princess Christian Nursing Home on 1 August 1978. The following month, Olivia and George married in a private ceremony at the Henley-on-Thames Register Office in England. Their contentment during this period was again reflected in George's music, much of which he wrote at their holiday property on Maui in Hawaii. His self-titled 1979 album includes the song "Dark Sweet Lady," which he said best captured the renewal Arias had provided in his life.

She was also habitually present in the recording studio with her husband. Producer Giles Martin said that she was often the one operating the recording button.

Following John Lennon's murder in New York in December 1980, Olivia, George and Dhani spent much of the early 1980s travelling in the Pacific region, alternately residing in Hana on Maui, and Hamilton Island in the north-east of Australia. As the wife of a former Beatle, Olivia largely stayed out of the public spotlight. During the late 1980s, she supported George's campaign to save Henley's Regal Cinema from redevelopment by the John Lewis supermarket chain, and campaigned with Ringo Starr's wife, Barbara Bach, on behalf of Parents for Safe Food. In 1989, she was the target of hate mail and death threats at George's and her Henley estate, Friar Park, the details of which were kept secret until a London police officer leaked the story to the press the following year.

In 1990, she fully embraced the media spotlight, in reaction to the plight of around 100,000 Romanian orphans left abandoned amid the chaos that followed the deposing of Romania's Communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. After visiting Romania in early April, she said she was "overwhelmed, devastated and shocked" by the suffering she had witnessed. That same month, she founded the Romanian Angel Appeal (RAA) to provide aid to the children, having enlisted support from the other Beatles' wives: Bach, Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono. George helped her promote the appeal on British television and radio, and, with his Traveling Wilburys bandmates, recorded a cover version of the song "Nobody's Child" to help raise funds for the orphans.

In October 1992, she wrote to The Guardian to express her disgust with the author Geoffrey Giuliano, who had recently published a biography of her husband. She accused Giuliano of falsifying a brief acquaintance with George into a friendship and criticised his depiction of Paul McCartney, whom Giuliano had dismissed as "vacuous and shallow".

On December 30, 1999, George and Olivia were attacked by a deranged man who broke into Friar Park. George went downstairs after hearing noises. Moments later, George returned, followed by the intruder, and was stabbed multiple times. Olivia attacked the assailant with a fireplace poker and a heavy table lamp, and he turned on her. After the local police arrived and detained the intruder, the Harrisons were treated for their wounds at a hospital. The man was quoted as saying he was on a "mission sent by God,” and that the Beatles were "witches.” The home invasion was a front-page news story around the world, with some headlines recognising Olivia as having "saved" her husband. The attack followed the arrest of a female stalker who had broken into the Harrisons' Maui home on December 23. In a 2005 interview, Olivia said of the December 30 incident: "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."

As of 2002, Harrison's 1990 Romanian Angel initiative was still active. In May 1990, before the release of the fundraising single and album, ten trucks filled with food, medical supplies and clothing, together with 32 aid workers, were dispatched to Romania. According to Harrison, all the funds raised by the appeal went directly to the cause, as the administrative costs were paid for by her and the other RAA founders. In September 2000, she and George met with local representatives to monitor the progress of the RAA-funded programs for orphanage sanitation and professional staff.

Harrison has continued to develop George's philanthropic initiatives. She is a director of the Material World Foundation (MWF), which he established in 1973 to "sponsor diverse forms of artistic expression and to encourage the exploration of alternative life views and philosophies", and of the Harrison Family Foundation. The Harrison Family Scholarship was launched by the MWF in 2002. It awards scholarships at Brown University in the United States, with preference given to non-American students, especially those from India and Mexico.

In late 2005, coinciding with the reissue of the album and film from the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, she established The George Harrison Fund for UNICEF with an initial focus on programs in Bangladesh. As of July 2015, the fund had also assisted children affected by civil conflict, natural disasters or poverty in Brazil, India, Angola, Romania, the Horn of Africa, Burma and Nepal. Harrison contributed to actress Salma Hayek's UNICEF fundraising campaign in response to the September 2017 Mexican earthquakes. Through the auspices of The George Harrison Fund for UNICEF, she then pledged to double the next $200,000 donation made to the campaign.

One of the fund's initiatives has been to introduce floating schools, which allow children in remote areas of Bangladesh that are affected by seasonal flooding to continue attending school. In her work as a UNICEF sponsor, she visited Bangladesh in February 2011 to oversee the fund's ongoing efforts there, and in 2015 promoted the UNICEF Kid Power program.