Long before Lita Ford became one of the most recognizable women in 1980s hard rock, she was a teenage guitarist trying to keep up with her heroes.
Born Sept. 19, 1958, in London, England, Ford moved with her family to the United States when she was 7, eventually settling in Long Beach, California. Inspired in particular by Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, she picked up the guitar at 11. Just five years later, she was recruited to join the Runaways.
Today, Ford turns 68.
As the Runaways’ lead guitarist, Ford helped give the groundbreaking all-female band its hard-rock edge alongside Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Sandy West and Jackie Fox. The group released its self-titled debut in 1976 and became an international touring act while its members were still teenagers. But musical differences eventually divided the band, with Jett favoring a more punk-oriented direction while Ford and West wanted to remain rooted in hard rock. The Runaways broke up in 1979.
Ford was far from done, though her rise to stardom wouldn’t always be easy.
“Back in the early 1980s, there were no other girls out there that could play like I could play,” she told Guitar Player in 2026. “And I had to prove it was me playing those songs, because nobody could accept it.”
Ford eventually set out on her own, releasing Out for Blood in 1983 and Dancin’ on the Edge the following year. Her real commercial breakthrough came after she signed with RCA and began working with Sharon Osbourne as her manager. Ford’s 1988 album Lita reached No. 29 on the Billboard 200 and was eventually certified platinum.
The album produced Ford’s signature solo hit, “Kiss Me Deadly,” which climbed to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. But an even bigger hit was waiting.
As Ford tells it, the inadvertent collaboration with Ozzy Osbourne was “a mistake” that happened at the tail end of a day at the studio.
“Ozzy stayed, Sharon got bored and left, and me and Ozzy had a couple of drinks and we were jamming,” Ford told Metal Underground in 2012. “There was a little side room with a guitar and keyboard and we started messing around, singing and playing, and we wrote ‘Close My Eyes Forever.’ Next thing I know the sun was coming up. I looked at him and I went ‘Uh-oh, we’re in trouble.'”
Sharon Osbourne immediately heard a hit in the song and urged the two to record it immediately. Released as a single in 1989, the duet reached No. 8 on the Hot 100, making it the highest-charting single of Ford’s career.
Neither of Ford’s two Grammy nominations, however, was for her duet with Ozzy. She earned her first Grammy nomination in 1985, when Dancin’ on the Edge was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Eight years later, she received a second nomination in the same category for her 1991 single “Shot of Poison,” further establishing her as one of the most prominent female rock artists of her time.
Ford’s pioneering work as a guitarist has earned her some particularly fitting honors in the decades since. In 2014, she was awarded Guitar Player‘s Certified Legend Award “as the first female shredder” and was inducted into the magazine’s Hall of Fame. Three years later, she received the Icon Award at the She Rocks Awards, which honors women in the music industry. Ford was inducted into the Metal Hall of Fame in 2019, recognizing a career that helped open doors for women in hard rock and heavy metal.
There is even a piece of Ford’s history in Cleveland: In 2021, one of her distinctive B.C. Rich Warlock guitars, which she named “Maurice” after Samantha Stephens’ warlock father in the Bewitched television series, was placed on exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“He was a badass,” Ford told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “And so I named my guitar, the Warlock, I mean, I thought, it just doesn’t get any cooler than that…I have to name my guitar Maurice. And now he’s iconic.”
Just like she is.
After stepping away from recording for more than a decade while raising her two sons, Ford returned to performing in 2008 and has continued touring and recording ever since.
For all the recognition, Ford doesn’t make much of the trail she blazed. When asked by Guitar World in 2024 if she had come to realize that she was a pioneer at a time when relatively few women were playing lead guitar, Ford was characteristically matter-of-fact.
“I wasn’t trying to carve out a path or the way for whatever was coming behind me,” she said. “I just wanted to be a leader, and I just wanted to play guitar.”
But the female guitarists who have come up in her wake might disagree. Guitar Player reported this year that Lzzy Hale of Halestorm credits Ford with “kicking the door down” for the generations of female guitarists who followed her.
And the pioneering rocker isn’t spending her 68th birthday looking backward. She has been working on a long-awaited new studio album and said this summer that she hoped to release it this fall.
Even more fittingly, Ford will celebrate her birthday exactly where a guitarist who first joined a rock band at 16 might want to be: onstage. She is scheduled to perform tonight at the Rose Music Center in Huber Heights, Ohio, alongside Dokken and Lynch Mob.
More than half a century after joining the Runaways, Lita Ford is still cranking the volume.
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