Who Is Mary Marquardt? Everything About Harrison Ford’s Ex-Wife

Mary Marquardt holds a quiet but important place in one of Hollywood’s most famous life stories. Long before Harrison Ford was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, he was a struggling young actor with small parts, rejection letters and a second job as a carpenter. The person standing beside him through all of those years was his first wife, Mary.

She was a trained illustrator who became a respected chef, the mother of his two eldest sons, and a woman who, after their divorce in 1979, chose a private life and kept it. This article tells her documented story, and answers the question readers ask most about her today, whether she is still alive, with the care that a private person’s life deserves.

Quick Facts

Who Is Mary Marquardt?

Mary Marquardt is an American former illustrator and chef who is best known as the first wife of actor Harrison Ford. She was born in 1945 in the United States. Her exact birth date and early family life have never been widely published, in keeping with the way she has lived, close to her family and far from publicity. Detailed reporting on her childhood does not exist in reliable sources, and any website offering a full early life story for her is filling gaps on its own.

What is documented is her creative career. Reference sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica describe Marquardt as an illustrator at the time of her marriage, and later accounts agree she built a substantial career in food as a professional chef. It shaped the next generation too, because her eldest son became a well known chef and restaurateur himself.

Mary Marquardt never acted and never used her husband’s growing fame as a platform. Her lifelong choice of privacy is the most consistent fact in her story.

College Days at Ripon and a Young Marriage

Marquardt met Harrison Ford at Ripon College, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin, where both were students in the early 1960s. Ford had come to Ripon and found his way into drama classes, discovering acting almost by chance near the end of his studies. Marquardt was studying there at the same time. Their college romance led quickly to marriage. The couple wed in 1964, with some reports giving the date as June 18, 1964. Ford was 21 and turning 22 that summer, and Marquardt was about 19 or 20, depending on her exact birth date, which has not been publicly confirmed.

Ford was not a rising star at the time. He was a young man with a new interest in acting and no guarantee the work would ever come. Marrying in 1964 meant sharing the risk completely. The couple soon left for California so Ford could try his luck in Hollywood, where he signed a small contract with Columbia Pictures, reported at about 150 dollars a week, and began the long run of tiny roles that marked his first decade.

Through those years Marquardt worked, supported the household and believed in a talent the industry had not yet noticed. The support was practical as well as emotional, keeping a young family steady while the acting income came and went.

Supporting Harrison Ford Through the Hard Years

The 1960s and early 1970s were lean years for the Fords. Ford appeared in small parts in films and television, including a minor role in American Graffiti in 1973, directed by George Lucas, but the breakthrough did not come. Frustrated with the roles on offer, he taught himself carpentry and built a second career as a carpenter to support his family, famously doing work for people inside the entertainment world while he waited for acting to turn a corner.

Family life grew during this same period. The couple’s first son, Benjamin, was born in 1966, and their second son, Willard, was born in 1969. So the household Marquardt was holding together was not just a couple chasing a dream. It was a family of four, with young children, school and bills, built on carpentry work, illustration and determination rather than movie money.

The turn, when it finally came, came fast. George Lucas cast Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars, released in 1977, and Ford went from working actor to global star in a single summer. Marquardt had been his wife for thirteen years by then, and she had carried the family through all of the years when success was only a hope. That history is why serious accounts of Ford’s life treat her role with respect. She was not present at the start of his fame as a bystander. She was one of the reasons he was still standing, and still acting, when the chance arrived.

Two Sons and a Family Built Before Fame

Benjamin Ford, the elder son, born in 1966, followed his mother’s path into food. He became a chef and restaurateur, known for Ford’s Filling Station, a gastropub he co-owned with locations in Los Angeles, including at L.A. Live and at Los Angeles International Airport. He has also written on cooking and built a public career in the Los Angeles food world. Reports on Marquardt’s life often note her influence on that choice, a chef mother whose professional kitchen work showed her son a trade as well as a passion.

Willard Ford, born in 1969, took a business path. He is known as the owner of Strong Sports Gym in Los Angeles, and he was co-owner of Ford and Ching, a design and furniture showroom, as well as the owner of the Ludwig Clothing company. Both sons built their adult lives in Los Angeles, and both have spoken over the years as men close to their mother, who remained a steady presence in the family after the marriage to their father ended.

Marquardt is also a grandmother, and her sons’ children grew up with her as part of their lives, even though she kept herself out of the public coverage that followed their famous father.

Divorce in 1979 and a Private Life After

The marriage ended in divorce in 1979, after fifteen years. The split came just two years after Star Wars changed everything, and it has often been discussed in terms of that sudden fame and the strain it placed on a marriage built in quieter, harder times. One later published account added a painful detail. In her 2016 memoir The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher wrote that she and Ford had a brief affair in 1976 during the filming of Star Wars. That claim, made nearly forty years after the events, is part of the published record around the marriage’s final years, though Ford himself, one of Hollywood’s most private actors, has never discussed the end of his first marriage in detail, and Marquardt has never discussed it publicly at all.

After the divorce, Ford’s life moved through a second marriage to screenwriter Melissa Mathison, from 1983 to 2004, and a third marriage to actress Calista Flockhart, whom he wed in 2010. Marquardt’s life moved in the opposite direction, away from attention. She continued her work as a chef and illustrator, raised her sons, and declined the public role that was available to her as the former wife of one of the world’s biggest stars.

Later reports about her health need careful handling. Many profile websites state that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 2000s and that she stepped back from professional cooking around 2001. These reports are widely repeated, but they trace back to secondary profiles rather than to any statement from Marquardt or her family, so they should be read as reported claims, not confirmed facts. What is certain is only the outline. She has lived privately in the United States, she has not given interviews about her marriage or her health, and she has not appeared in public life in any sustained way for many years.

Is Mary Marquardt Still Alive?

This is the question that brings most readers to her name today, so it deserves a direct and honest answer. There is no report of Mary Marquardt’s death in any reliable news source, reference work or family statement. Reference works continue to list her as Harrison Ford’s former wife without any death date, and profiles published in recent years continue to describe her as living a private life. On the available evidence, she is understood to be alive, in her early eighties, having been born in 1945, and living out of the public eye.

Readers should be alert to a common internet problem here. Some content sites invent death dates or dramatic health updates for private people connected to stars, because such claims draw clicks. No such claim about Marquardt is supported by a trustworthy source. Equally, her privacy means there are no recent confirmed photographs, interviews or public updates to point to. The silence around her is not a mystery to be solved. It is the life she chose in 1979 and has kept, with remarkable consistency, ever since.

FAQs

Is Mary Marquardt still alive?

No reliable source has reported her death, and recent profiles describe her as living a private life in the United States. Born in 1945, she would be in her early eighties. She has made no public appearances or statements in recent years, by her own long standing choice.

How long were Mary Marquardt and Harrison Ford married?

They married in 1964, after meeting at Ripon College in Wisconsin, and divorced in 1979. The marriage lasted fifteen years and covered Ford’s entire struggle from unknown actor to Star Wars star.

How many children did Mary Marquardt have?

She had two sons with Harrison Ford, Benjamin Ford, born in 1966, who became a chef and restaurateur, and Willard Ford, born in 1969, a businessman known for Strong Sports Gym and design ventures in Los Angeles.

What did Mary Marquardt do for a living?

She worked first as an illustrator, which is how reference works describe her at the time of her marriage, and later built a career as a professional chef. Reports that she retired from cooking around 2001 after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis are widely repeated but have not been confirmed by her family.

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Final Thoughts

Mary Marquardt’s story matters because it corrects the usual Hollywood timeline. Harrison Ford’s success looks sudden only if you start the story in 1977. Start it in 1964, in a college town in Wisconsin, and it becomes a fifteen year story of a young couple, two small sons, carpentry jobs and illustration work, and a wife whose steady support kept the dream alive until it came true. Her marriage ended in 1979, but her own life, as a chef, a mother and a grandmother, continued on her own terms, in private. That privacy, kept for more than four decades, is her story’s clearest statement about who she is.

Featured photo: Harrison Ford – photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons