George Harrison wrote "Something," arguably one of the greatest love songs in music history, about his first wife, Pattie Boyd, but their marriage didn't stand the same test of time as his lyrics and melody: The pair divorced after Boyd left Harrison, a Beatle, for Eric Clapton, a guitar god.
And that wasn't even the only love triangle to plague the couple's marriage. According to Boyd, Harrison cheated on her with his bandmate Ringo Starr's then-wife Maureen Starkey (no, really!). That's a lot of drama for a man known as the "quiet Beatle."
Keep reading to learn more about Harrisons wives, including who he was married to at the time of his death in 2001.
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Harrison was married two times: first to Pattie Boyd, from 1966 to 1974, then to Olivia Harrison, from 1978 until the time of his death in 2001.
How did George Harrison and Pattie Boyd meet?
Boyd was 19 and just starting her modeling career when she got a small part as a school-aged Beatles fan in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. Harrison was immediately smitten with the young woman and asked her to dinner, but she politely declined because she was seeing someone else at the time. A week later, newly single and back on set for a photo shoot, she changed her answer — and the course of her life forever.
That summer, Harrison bought a quiet country home to retreat from the chaos of Beatlemania, and Boyd soon joined him there. Less than two years after their first meeting, on Jan. 21, 1966, they were married.
Related: New Details Emerge About George Harrison’s Near-Fatal Stabbing Attack: ‘Like a Horror Film’
The short answer is that Boyd left Harrison for their friend and fellow rocker Eric Clapton, kicking off one of the most famous love triangles in music history. But, really, their marriage had been unraveling for years.
On leaving Harrison, Boyd told The Telegraph in 2022, “It was an extremely difficult decision of mine to make.”
“I felt that I had to leave George because things were getting really out of hand. George was just being a different George. We had gone in different directions, basically. But we still loved each other…”
Addressing his well-documented infidelity, which included an affair with Ringo Starr’s then-wife Maureen, Boyd added, “It’s just that I think he wanted to spread his wings and take advantage of being the handsome, famous, rich guy that he was, and see how the girls feel about him. A hot-blooded boy – why not, I suppose.”
Related: Ringo Starr's Net Worth in 2025
Did Pattie Boyd leave George Harrison for Eric Clapton?
Technically, yes, but her marriage to Harrison had been suffering for years due in part to his own infidelity. Still, her decision to leave Harrison for Clapton — who had been pining for her for more than a decade despite being friends with the Beatle (she was even the inspiration for his 1970 hit “Layla”) — was a massive story in 1974 and remains a major part of the band's lore to this day.
Harrison, the most reclusive of the Beatles, wasn’t big on talking to the press about his private affairs (none of the band members were, really). But he did reportedly tell Men Only magazine in 1978 that, “For a long time I could not talk about Pattie, after she left. But I now admit that I loved her very much and wish her the best.”
For her part, Boyd told People that Harrison had a good-natured response to her leaving him. "He said, 'Well, I'm glad you're going off with Eric instead of some idiot," she recalled. "So he appreciated my choice!"
Boyd married Clapton in 1979 (two years after he wrote another song for her — a little ditty called “Wonderful Tonight”) and they divorced a decade later. In her book Wonderful Today, she described their marriage as tumultuous due to his alcoholism, drug addiction and alleged rockstar narcissism and cruelty. But in a 2022 interview, when she recalled seeing him more recently, she said, "He was just so joyful when he last saw each other. He gave me the biggest hug and he was so happy to see me."
No. Boyd has spoken about the fact that she was never able to conceive, although usually when talking about her marriage to Clapton, since that was when she tried infertility treatments and IVF.
“I thought that, naturally, when I grew up and got married I’d have children,’ she told The Daily Mail. ‘I thought it just goes with the idea of being a woman. Then, when it didn’t happen, I started to panic and wondered why. ‘Once you come to terms with the fact that it’s not going to happen to you, it takes a while to get a grip on reality and bite your lip.”
Did George Harrison cheat on Pattie Boyd with Ringo’s wife Maureen?
Harrison and Maureen never confirmed an affair, but Boyd wrote about it in her memoir. “The final straw was his affair with Maureen Starr, Ringo’s wife,” she shared. “She was the last person I would have expected to stab me in the back, but she did.”
She also remembered coming home once to find Harrison and Boyd locked in a room together.
“I stood outside banging on the door and saying to George, ‘What are you doing? Maureen’s in there, isn’t she? I know she is,’ but he laughed,” she wrote. “He was supposed to be in the studio and everyone was waiting for him. Eventually he opened the door and said, ‘Oh, she’s just a bit tired so she’s lying down.”
Yes. She’s 81 years old and lives in London, England, with her third husband, property developer Rod West.
Who was George Harrison married to when he died?
Harrison was married to author/producer Olivia Harrison (née Arias) when he died in 2001. They’d been together since 1978.
“I remember, when George died, wanting the clock to stop right then and there, because I thought, ‘One day I'm going to look back, and it'll be five years,’” Harrison shared in 2022, promoting her poetry collection Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George. “And now it's 20 years.”
What happened to George Harrison’s wife Olivia?
Harrison left his reported $400 million estate to his widow and their son, Dhani, when he died of cancer in 2001. Since then, she’s managed that estate, including his music and archives, and reissues of his work and releases tied to his legacy.
Next: The Beatles Ranked By Net Worth
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