For almost every other rock musician in the world, the idea of having once been lead guitarist with the Beatles might have seemed like a life filled to the brim with glorious memories.
But for George Harrison, often labelled the quiet one, it became a burden he could have done without.
The world might have still been in love with the Beatles, but, as the decades passed, he wasn't.
He found the Beatle industry and the mythology surrounding them silly - part of something crazy that had happened a very long time ago.
He was proud of the music the Beatles made, but quietly appalled and terminally bored by the Beatles culture.
But then he was having his doubts about life as a Beatle long before the others fell out of love with the four-headed monster they had created.
As early as 1968, when the Beatles were at the height of their fame and creative powers, he was saying: "I don't personally enjoy being a Beatle anymore. All that Beatles thing is trivial and unimportant."
When they broke up in 1970, he must have thought he would be free of them.
But that was never going to be possible. Because, although he was only 26 when the Beatles last played together, he would remain a Beatle in the public's mind for the rest of his life.
But perhaps also disappointing for George these past 30 years was the realisation that no matter what he achieved as a solo artist, the best part of his career was over at the age that many young professional men had just begun theirs.
He had, after all, been only 23 when he had begun working on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, regarded by many as the Beatles finest moment.
Life after that had to be an anti-climax.
If we imagine the Beatles as a family, with John Lennon as the dominant, though erratic and sometimes wayward father, Paul McCartney as the busy, hard working, respectable, ambitious and pushy mother and Ringo as the affable kid everyone loved, but from whom no one expected very much, George Harrison always appeared as the shy, occasionally funny in a droll sense, but increasingly fed-up teenager.
It was a role he was to play till his death, from the day when, at 14, an older boy he knew from his bus ride to school, Paul McCartney, introduced him to John Lennon. From that night on, he was the baby in the Beatles band, the nice looking one with the tombstone teeth and the slow lugubrious Liverpool accent.
And though at first, like the others, he loved being swept along on the rapids of success, eventually he came to resent the massive, competing egos of Lennon and McCartney.
John and Paul always made sure their songs went on the albums: George had to battle to get his properly recorded or even recorded at all.
He could have settled for a role as a lesser Beatle, like Ringo Starr. But he didn't.
He developed new interests, taking up meditation and Indian mysticism, thereby introducing the other Beatles to Indian music which became very much part of their hippy, psychedelic, late '60s phase.
He perservered with his song writing too, eventually forcing the others to accept his talent when he composed one of the all time classic love songs, "Something".
Grand houses and gardens were not something to which George Harrison was born in 1943.
The son of a bus driver, he was the youngest of four in a normal working class home living, from the age of 10 in a council house.
After attending the same primary school as Lennon (although they didn't know each other), at 11 he passed the scholarship to a grammar school, The Liverpool Institute, where he did badly.
At 14, he talked his parents into buying him a second hand guitar for £3-10s.
Learning to play didn't come easily, but, as he would demonstrate all his life, he persevered.
Three years younger than Lennon, it was George's ability to play "Raunchy", a guitar solo hit of 1957, which prompted the older boy, with some embarrassment, to offer him a place alongside himself and Paul in the Quarrymen, Lennon's first group.
For three years, as John, Paul, George and any drummer they could lay their hands on, went through a variety of names, playing at local Liverpool parties, weddings, fetes, coffee bars and finally clubs, George studied only the guitar.
With a limited range, he never had a great singing voice, but with encouragement, he made the best of it. Thus when the Beatles became successful, George found himself being given a song or two to perform on every Beatle album.
Sensing the youngest Beatle's uncertainty alongside his older, pushier colleagues, record producer George Martin would often say at this time that he considered Harrison the most musical of the group.
He was certainly the best guitarist. And, after contributing the striking lead acoustic guitar work on "And I Love Her", by the Beatles third album he had come up with the most recognised single guitar chord in pop music, the resonating, extended opening to the Beatles theme song for their first film A Hard Day's Night.
Suddenly George was coming out from behind his shyness.
Always particularly popular with girl fans and groupies, he now got off with the prettiest extra in the film, a young model called Patti Boyd. They were married in 1966.
But he was also developing in other ways. Introduced to Indian musician Ravi Shankar by actor Peter Sellers, he bought a sitar and played it on John Lennon's song "Norwegian Wood".
Over the next couple of years he would become increasingly fascinated by all thing Indian, not to mention mysticism and meditation.
Though all the Beatles had smoked pot, he and Lennon were introduced by a friend to LSD and the effects were seen immediately in their music, most notably on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper.
Although George quickly renounced LSD, his passion for India increased, going with the other members of the band to study transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968.
Always a spiritual person, he would spend the rest of his life pursuing his own transcendental level of consciousness beyond that of the material world.
When in 1969 John Lennon decided to break the Beatles up, it must have been a relief for George too.
Increasingly, he was finding himself out of step with Paul McCartney, as the documentary film Let It Be was to show.
A few days later he walked out of the group, though he returned to finish the album.
In terms of his own career the immediate post-Beatle years of the early '70s were George's best.
Over the years he had saved up a legion of songs rejected by the two senior partners in the Beatles and now he recorded and put them all out together in a triple album, All Things Must Pass.
It was a huge worldwide success, though some of the shine must have been knocked off that when, after a long court case, it was decided he had subconsciously plagiarised the Chiffons song "He's So Fine", while writing his hit "My Sweey Lord".
His next project in 1971 was a huge charity show for famine relief in the new country of Bangladesh.
He pulled together a brilliant line-up of musicians, including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Ravi Shankar and Ringo Starr, for a filmed and recorded concert at Madison Square Garden.
Patti, about whom he'd written "Something", then fell in love with his best friend, Eric Clapton, who had played the lead guitar on his Beatles song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
It wasn't until 1977 that they were divorced, but when they finally did and Patti married Eric, there was George at the ceremony.
He'd already helped produce and finance a TV parody of the Beatles called The Rutles, when the Monty Python team approached him for funding for The Life Of Brian.
The team had been rejected everywhere else because of its seemingly sacrilegious content. He agreed immediately. It was, he said, "the most expensive cinema ticket ever."
But it paid off - at first. The film was a big success and his company, Handmade Films, quickly followed up with another hit, The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins.
By now he was married to his second wife, Mexican born Californian Olivia Trinidad Arias, whom he had been introduced to when she was working as a secretary in Los Angeles at his record company.
At first they lived together in Beverly Hills, but eventually moved back to England to Friar Park, Henley, where their only son, Dhani, was born in 1978.
Two years later, in 1980, John Lennon was murdered by a mad fan. The perceived glory of celebrity had now become inverted. Being a Beatle could be dangerous too. Security at Friar Park was extended.
But what was a mucisian to do but play? George could only stay out of the studios for so long and in the '80s his musical career had a sudden resergence.
First came his part in a TV concert starring his guitar playing idol Carl Perkins, whose "Blue Suede Shoes" George had played on stage hundreds of times.
Then came a new batch of hits with "I Got My Mind Set On You", followed by a wry reflection on his Beatle career, "When We Was Fab" ans also a lament to John Lennon, "All Those Years Ago".
He'd always enjoyed playing in a band, without necessarily being the band leader, so when he teamed up with fellow stars Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty to form the part time group the Traveling Wilburys, the situation seemed to suit him perfectly.
To a large extent, relations had been patched up with Paul McCartney. They put together the Beatles Anthology TV series, albums and book, even playing together to record the John Lennon songs "Real Love" and "Free As A Bird".
Then in 1998, George discovered a lump in his throat. It was throat cancer. He blamed it on smoking and after radiation treatment he was given the all-clear.
But there was no such warning in the early morning of the Millennium Eve 18 months later. While he was asleep in bed, another insane fan, Michael Abram, from Liverpool of all places, evaded all security and broke into Friar Park.
Awoken by the sound of breaking glass, George went to investigate and was attacked with a knife.
Stabbed at least 10 times in the ensuing struggle, he was saved by his wife Olivia, who hit the intruder with a vase.
George made a complete recovery from the attack, but then in spring this year another cancer was found and he had part of one lung removed at a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, to be followed by a course of radio therapy at a Swiss clinic.
Although he was the quietest of the Beatles, George Harrison was, in many ways, the strongest and most self-sufficient of all of them.
Even from the beginning he seemed to need the world less than it needed him, a thought put to music in his very first published song, "Don't Bother Me" - "Leave me alone" and repeated in one way or another for the rest of his career.