George Harrison was the quiet, mystic Beatle whose talent was often overshadowed by the colossal achievements of his bandmates.
But his low profile - both within the band and since - masked his often spectacular input into the Fab Four's career.
He was behind enough of the group's most beautiful songs - Something, Here Comes The Sunand While My Guitar Gently Weeps- for him to be considered a musical genius in any lesser group.
Harrison was born in 1943 in the Wavetree area of Liverpool. His mother was a housewife and his father a bus driver.
A mediocre student, he showed a keen interest in music from an early age, receiving his first guitar - a gift from his mother - when he was 13.
He formed his own group, called The Rebels, but it was short-lived and not long afterwards a schoolfriend called Paul McCartney, invited him to join the Quarry Men - the group that evolved into The Beatles.
In 1960 the group headed for Hamburg to work in the lively club scene but when the authorities discovered that Harrison was only 17 - too young to have a work permit - he had to return to England.
While John Lennon and McCartney collaborated in the early days of the band on the songs that would change the face of pop and rock, Harrison worked alone contributing the occasional track to each album.
It was not until March 1968 that he was allowed to contribute a track to a single, his typically mystical The Inner Light,which was the B-side to Lady Madonna. A year and a half later he was rewarded with a double A-side when Somethingwas released with Come Together.
As the band's career took off and they became a major world force, so his interest in Far Eastern spirituality began, something which would leave its mark across both the band's music and his own solo career.
At first the influence was subtle with Norwegian Wood's sitar lead line and then more blatant on Within You Without Youfrom Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
He went on to indulge his gifts outside the group with solo albums Wonderwall Musicand Electronic Musicas well as producing Hare Krishna Mantrafor the Radha Krishna Temple, a top 20 track released on the Beatles' own Apple label.
At the same time he was also creating some of his most valuable songs for the group with both Something- considered by Frank Sinatra to be one of the world's greatest love songs, although he mistakenly thought it was by Lennon and McCartney - and Here Comes The Sunon Abbey Road.
The youngest member of the band, he had long been frustrated by his position playing second fiddle to the band's main writers. He walked out on occasion but returned again to the fold.
Within a year of the band's demise, Harrison was back in the charts with My Sweet Lordand staging charity concerts for Bangladesh in New York.
His next album Living In The Material Worldhad a more muted response. This was followed by a poorly received US tour and the album Dark Horse, widely seen as Harrison's creative nadir.
The bleak record also reflected his misery at the collapse of his first marriage to model Patti Boyd.
She left him for his once-good friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton, who had played lead guitar on Harrison's Beatles track While My Guitar Gently Weepsand performed at the Bangladesh concerts.
The end of the Harrisons' marriage led to a bitter feud between the two musicians, which only healed in the past few years.
Harrison went on to find happiness again with Olivia whom he met while touring the US in 1974. She was working in the Los Angeles office of his record company, Dark Horse.
Career wrangles dogged Harrison during the late Seventies. He was sued by one company for delivering an album late and challenged in a New York court over a copyright issue.
The court found he had unconsciously plagiarised The Chiffons song He's So Finewith his single My Sweet Lord.
Harrison branched out into film finance to team up with his comedy heroes the Monty Python team for their movie Life Of Brian.
His Handmade Films company also made many other movies including Withnail and I, Time Bandits, The Long Good Fridayand Madonnna's Shanghai Surprise.
But the company, which was once hailed as the saviour of the British film industry, went on to make a series of losses and was eventually sold to a Canadian firm.
On the music front, Harrison bounced back to the charts in 1981 with his homage to murdered Lennon, All Those Years Ago, which featured McCartney and Ringo Starr.
But the next album Gone Troppoin 1982 again had a lukewarm response and became his last for five years.
Instead he devoted increasing amounts of his time to motor racing and gardening, although he did work with Wombles supremo Mike Batt on his musical The Hunting Of The Snarkand on a Greenpeace benefit LP.
After another solo effort Cloud Ninein 1987, which produced hit singles Got My Mind Set On Youand When We Was Fab, Harrison teamed up with rock'n'roll luminaries to form the supergroup Traveling Wilburys.
He featured alongside Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and producer and former ELO star Jeff Lynne in the new band, with each assuming a pseudonym.
In 1992 Harrison toured Japan with Clapton - who had become a friend again - and played a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in aid of the spiritual Natural Law Party, which fielded candidates in that year's General Election.
He revived his partnership with Sir Paul and Starr in the mid-1990s to oversee the Beatles Anthology series of albums and videos.
PA