Singer, musician, and songwriter, born in Liverpool, Merseyside, NW England, UK. He played lead guitar and sang with the Beatles, and developed an interest in Indian music and Eastern religion, receiving instruction on the sitar from Ravi Shankar, and associating with the religious leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Following the break-up of the Beatles, he made a solo album, All Things Must Pass (1970), which included the gospelly hit ‘My Sweet Lord’, later the subject of an expensive plagiarism suit. Later solo albums included Living in the Material World (1973), Dark Horse (1974), and Somewhere in England (1981), and he joined with other artists in the ‘super-group’ The Traveling Wilburys (1988–90), and with Starr and McCartney to produce the Beatles anthology (1995). He formed Dark Horse Records in 1974, and a film company, HandMade Films, in 1978, producing a number of feature films, such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Time Bandits (1981, also writing the music and lyrics), A Private Function (1984), and Withnail and I (1987). He also wrote a volume of autobiography, I Me Mine. He was severely wounded following a knife attack by an intruder at his Henley home at the end of 1999, and died in 2001 after a long battle against cancer.