Even during his final days, George Harrison, the mystical Beatle whose talent was often overshadowed by his bandmates' colossal achievements, lived up to his reputation as "the quiet one".
Harrison had known for several months that he was dying.
But he, his wife Olivia and son Dhani struck an agreement to remain silent about Harrison's declining health as they shared every last moment together and searched the world for a cure that never came.
It was only in the past week that many friends learned the true extent of his cancer. Even the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, remained in the dark until they saw him a fortnight ago. Harrison was behind enough of the group's most beautiful songs - "Something", "Here Comes The Sun" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" - for him to be considered a musical genius in any lesser group.
Like the other Beatles, Harrison came from a working class neighbourhood, but was the only one to come from a happy family.
He was born in 1943 in the Wavertree area of Liverpool. His mother was a housewife and his father a bus driver.
He had two older brothers who would end up working for him at his 34 acre estate at Henley-on-Thames, west of London, helping turn its grounds into one of England's best gardens.
A mediocre student, Harrison showed a keen interest in music from an early age, receiving his first guitar, a gift from his mother, at 13.
It was a chance meeting with Paul McCartney on a bus that led him to join the Quarry Men - the group which evolved into the Beatles. In 1960, the group headed for Hamburg to work in the lively club scene, but when the authorities discovered Harrison was only 17, too young to have a work permit, he was forced to return to England.
While John Lennon and McCartney collaborated in the early days of the band on the songs which changed the face of popular music, Harrison worked alone contributing the occasional track to each album.
But 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 half later, Harrison was rewarded with a double A-side when "Something" was released with "Come Together".
As the youngest member of the Beatles, he had long been frustrated by playing second fiddle to its main writers and being cast in the role of little brother.
In his somewhat bitter autobiography, I Me Mine, Harrison complained he got the poor end of studio time and the others weren't interested in his songs.
Often his personality was dwarfed by his gregarious bandmates and because of that, he was the Beatle who seemed hardest to penetrate - a mystique that evolved into something more mystical as Harrison immersed himself in Eastern spiritual teachings and introduced the Indian sitar to the Beatles' sound.
Harrison led the Beatles to Maharishi Yogi in 1967 for lessons in transcendental meditation.
In 1971, Harrison organised the Concert for Bangladesh, a star studded event that influenced events such as Live Aid.
"It was like reaching the top of a wall and then looking over and seeing that there's so much more on the other side," Harrison recalled in 1982 of his spiritual transformation.
Within a year of the Beatles' demise, Harrison was the first of the band members to enjoy massive solo success with his album, All Things Must Pass, which remains the most critically acclaimed of any post-Beatle work and a huge hit single with "My Sweet Lord".
His second solo album, Living In The Material World, had a more muted response and 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, whom he met on the set of the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night, when he was just 20.
She left him for his good friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton, who had already paid musical tribute to the beauty of Boyd on the song "Layla".
Harrison and Clapton, whom Boyd later left, eventually patched up their friendship.
Yesterday Boyd, now 54, said: "I am just so, so sad. It is a great shock and I am terribly upset. I just loved him so much."
Harrison went on, however, to find happiness with Olivia whom he met in 1974 when she worked in the Los Angeles office of his record company Dark Horse.
The couple had one child, a son Dhani (which is pronounced Danny) who was born in August 1978, making Harrison the last of the Beatles to become a father.
One of Harrison's most joyous moments in his final months was flying to Boston with family and friends to see Dhani graduate from university.
Career wrangles dogged Harrison during the late '70s. He was sued by one company for delivering an album late and challenged in court over a copyright issue.
The court found he had unconsciously plagiarised the Chiffons song "He's So Fine" with his single "My Sweet Lord".
Harrison branched out into film finance to team up with the Monty Python team for their movie Life Of Brian.
His Handmade Films company also made many other movies including Time Bandits, The Long Good Friday and Madonna's Shanghai Surprise.
But the company, once hailed as the saviour of the British film industry, went on to lose money and was sold to a Canadian firm.
On the music front, Harrison bounced back to the charts in 1981 with his homage to the murdered John Lennon, "All Those Years Ago", which featued McCartney and Ringo Starr.
But the next album Gone Troppo in 1982 again had a luke warm response and became his last for five years.
Instead, he devoted more time to motor racing and gardening and was a regular visitor to Australia for the Grand Prix in Adelaide and Melbourne.
After another solo effort, Cloud Nine in 1987, which produced hit single "Got My Mind Set On You" and "When We Was Fab", Harrison teamed up with luminaries Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and producer and former ELO star Jeff Lynne to form the Traveling Wilburys.
In the mid-1990s, Harrison, McCartney and Starr put the bitterness of the past behind them to oversee the Beatles Anthology series of albums and videos and collaborate together musically to put flesh on the bones of two detached vocal tracks laid down by Lennon.
The collaborations also earned him many millions and the family estate he left last week could be worth upwards of $300 million.
In 1997, Harrison's health suffered a serious relapse as he underwent an operation for a cancerous lump on his neck and had readiation therapy.
Afterwards the life long smoker said: "I got it purely from smoking."
Shortly after Christmas 1999, Harrison was also almost fatally wounded when a schizophrenic attacker gained entry to his English mansion and stabbed him in the chest.
While he was recovering from the attack, his health problems returned and he underwent surgery earlier this year to remove a cancerous lump from a lung.
Friends said yesterday that soon afterwards his health deteriorated rapidly and treatments in Switzerland, New York and Los Angeles were unsuccessful.
At the very end, Harrison was surrounded by loved ones.
The announcement of his death was delayed a day to allow his family to hold a private service.
"Paul McCartney did the same when Linda died and it's something they learned could give them some space and avoid the obvious jamboree," a friend said.
In the final few weeks, Harrison phoned many friends. He was emotional but accepting, even cracking jokes.
Harrison's godson, English actor Dominic Taylor, spent much time with his family. Harrison became a surrogate father to Taylor after his own father Derek Taylor, the Beatles' publicist, died. Harrison wrote once that Dominic was his kindred spirit.
Taylor told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday: "He was the most tolerant, patient man I know. I remember once keeping him waiting at a railway station for two hours after I missed a train, but he never complained when I eventually turned up. He just said, 'I'm so glad that I didn't miss you'."
Harrison's Indian musical mentor, Ravi Shankar, spent the day before he died with him.
"Even then he looked peaceful, surrounded by love," he said.
"George was a brave and beautiful soul, full of love, childlike humour and a deep spirituality."