Guitar hero Lita Ford was born on September 19, 1958, in London, England, to a couple right out of an old school romance novel. Harry Lenard Ford, a British soldier, and Isabella Benvenuto, an Italian nurse met during World War II, and afterwards settled briefly in England. When Lita was a young child, the family moved first to Boston, where her mother had relatives, and eventually made their way to Los Angeles for more opportunity and a better lifestyle.
As Ford later wrote in her memoir Living Like a Runaway (2016), her parents “gave me a strong, stable, middle-class home to always crawl back to,” a foundation she carried with her even as she entered the unpredictable world of rock.
Growing up in the Long Beach suburb of Lakewood, California, she developed a fascination with music and taught herself guitar at an early age. Her passion for hard rock and metal was just one of the ways she stood out as she leaned toward the heavy styles of Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.
By her early teens, she could already shred and did it with attitude. In her book, Lita remembered blasting Sabbath in her bedroom as the founders intended, and got little pushback from mom and dad.
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