Before Han Solo. Before Indiana Jones. Before the name Harrison Ford meant anything outside a Los Angeles carpentry job site, there was a young art student named Mary Marquardt who bet on him anyway.
Mary Marquardt is a former chef and illustrator best known as Harrison Ford’s first wife. She and Ford were married from 1964 to 1979, a stretch that covers his entire climb from struggling actor to global star. She rarely gives interviews and has spent decades away from cameras, which is exactly why her name keeps resurfacing in search results every time Ford makes headlines. People want to know who was there before the fame, and what became of her once it arrived.
Here’s what’s actually documented about her life, her marriage, her sons, and the health battle she’s fought quietly for over three decades.
Who Is Mary Marquardt?
Mary Marquardt was born in 1945 in the United States, though details of her childhood remain private by her own choice. She studied at Ripon College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin, where she pursued art and illustration and reportedly took part in cheerleading during her time there, according to multiple biography roundups covering her early years.
It was at Ripon that she met a fellow student named Harrison Ford. The two became a couple during their college years, long before either of them had any idea he’d end up carrying a bullwhip in a fedora for a living.
The Marriage to Harrison Ford
Marquardt and Ford married in June 1964. She was twenty years old. The pair packed up and moved to Los Angeles not long after, chasing Ford’s acting ambitions with little money and even less certainty about how things would turn out.
Those first years were rough. Ford worked as a carpenter, building sets and cabinets for people like Sergio Mendes and Joan Didion while auditioning on the side, and Marquardt worked as a chef and freelance illustrator to keep the household running. It’s the kind of origin story that sounds romantic in hindsight but was clearly exhausting to live through.
They had two sons together. Benjamin “Ben” Ford was born on September 22, 1966, and Willard Ford followed on May 14, 1969. Both boys were raised largely during the years their father was still an unknown quantity in Hollywood, not the household name he’d become after Star Wars hit theaters in 1977.
The marriage ended in 1979, after fifteen years together. Multiple outlets, including a widely cited feature from TheThings, report that the split followed Ford’s relationship with his Star Wars costar Carrie Fisher, which Fisher herself later wrote about candidly in her memoir Wishful Drinking. Reports on the exact timeline and cause vary slightly across sources, but the divorce and its rough timing around Ford’s breakout fame are consistently documented.
Life After the Divorce
Marquardt didn’t disappear into obscurity after the split. She built a career of her own as a professional chef, at one point running a filling station property in Culver City that had previously belonged to Ford, which later became the inspiration for her son Ben’s restaurant.
According to an interview Ben Ford gave to the Daily Mail in 2014, his mother later dated a television director named Bob Becker, who worked on shows including Dallas and Knots Landing. Ben described the situation warmly, saying he felt like he got the best of it because Becker also loved to cook.
Marquardt never remarried after Ford. She continued working as a chef until 2001, when illness forced her to step back from professional kitchens for good.
Her Sons: Ben Ford and Willard Ford
Ben Ford followed his mother directly into the culinary world. He’s a chef and restaurateur best known for co-founding Ford’s Filling Station, a gastropub with a location inside Terminal 5 at Los Angeles International Airport, alongside earlier restaurants in Culver City and Santa Monica. He’s credited his mother repeatedly for teaching him to cook, saying in interviews that her recipes and her patience in the kitchen shaped his entire approach to food.
Willard Ford took a different path. He’s the founder of Ludwig Clothing and has previously been connected to businesses including Strong Sports Gym and the Kim Sing Theatre in Los Angeles. Compared to his brother, Willard has kept an even lower public profile.
Both sons have their own families. Ben has two children, and reports indicate Willard does as well, though neither brother discusses their kids publicly with any regularity.
The Multiple Sclerosis Diagnosis
This is the part of Marquardt’s story that gets the least attention and probably deserves the most.
Sometime in the late 1980s, sources differ slightly on the exact year, Marquardt was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease of the central nervous system with no cure. According to a 2023 report from MEAWW, she kept the diagnosis largely private for years because MS symptoms are unpredictable and can vary wildly from one day to the next, which made it easier to hide than a more visible condition might have been.
Ben Ford has spoken about this publicly on more than one occasion. In a 2017 interview, he said he didn’t fully grasp what was happening with his mother when he was young and that it took time to understand her condition. That same year, he launched a campaign called ReimagineMySelf, aimed at helping people living with MS see new possibilities in their lives despite the disease, and he’s developed recipes specifically for people managing the physical limitations MS can cause.
The illness eventually cost Marquardt her ability to cook professionally, which is a genuinely heavy loss for someone who built her identity around food for decades. She responded by passing her recipes and technique directly to Ben rather than letting that knowledge disappear with her career.
Reports from 2024 and 2025 indicate Ford has continued supporting Marquardt financially and personally in the years since their divorce, including buying her a home. Marquardt has described their relationship since the split as friendly rather than bitter, telling one outlet that they simply grew apart but stayed close as family.
Is Mary Marquardt Still Alive?
Yes. Rumors that she’d passed away circulated online around 2021, but they were false. As of the most recent reporting available, Marquardt is in her early eighties, living privately, and staying close to her sons and grandchildren. She doesn’t use social media and doesn’t give interviews, so most updates on her life come secondhand through Ben’s occasional posts and comments.
Worth flagging here: a lot of the celebrity biography sites that come up when you search her name repeat the same handful of facts, sometimes padded out with invented scene settings about their college meeting or their early apartment. The verified core of her story, the marriage dates, the sons’ birthdays, the MS diagnosis, and Ben’s advocacy work, holds up across multiple independent reports. The flowery narrative details around it often don’t come from any named source at all, so it’s fair to treat those parts as filler rather than fact.
What Is Mary Marquardt’s Net Worth?
This is genuinely murky territory. A handful of lower tier celebrity bio sites have floated figures in the one to two million dollar range, attributing it to her chef and illustration career plus any divorce settlement from Ford. None of that is independently verified, and Marquardt has never discussed her finances publicly, so treat any specific dollar figure attached to her name with real skepticism.
FAQ
How old is Mary Marquardt? She was born in 1945, which puts her in her early eighties as of 2026.
Did Mary Marquardt and Harrison Ford stay in touch after the divorce? By most accounts, yes. Both have described the relationship as friendly, and Ford has reportedly provided financial support during her illness.
Does Mary Marquardt have any social media accounts? No. She keeps a private life and does not maintain a public social media presence. Most photos and updates come from her son Ben’s accounts.
What did Mary Marquardt do for work? She worked as a professional chef and freelance illustrator, retiring from cooking around 2001 due to her health.
Who are Mary Marquardt’s children? Two sons with Harrison Ford, Ben Ford, a chef and restaurateur, and Willard Ford, a clothing designer and entrepreneur.
