George Harrison's wife Olivia bravely stepped in after the former Beatle was stabbed in the chest by a man who had broken into his home.
Harrison was stabbed repeatedly after an intruder entered his stately home in Oxfordshire on December 30, 1999.
George Abram, a 34-year-old man with paranoid schizophrenia broke into Harrison's house and stabbed him over 40 times with a kitchen knife.
The attack was stopped after Olivia Harrison, who this year released Came the Lightening, a book of 20 poems dedicated to George, incapacitated the assailant by striking him with a lamp and a fireplace poker.
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George Harrison later said: "I felt exhausted and could feel the strength draining from me. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust to my chest. I could hear my lung exhaling and had blood in my mouth. I believed I had been fatally stabbed."
Upon being released from a mental hospital in 2002 after less than three years in state custody, Abram said: "If I could turn back the clock, I would give anything not to have done what I did in attacking George Harrison, but looking back on it now, I have come to understand that I was at the time not in control of my actions. I can only hope the Harrison family might somehow find it in their hearts to accept my apologies."
Having seen Harrison looking so healthy beforehand, those in his social circle believed that the attack brought about a change in him and was the cause for the return of cancer which had previously affected him in the late 1990s.
George Harrison died aged 58 on November 29, 2001, at a property belonging to Paul McCartney on Heather Road in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, with Olivia among those at his side.
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