A British soldier and an Italian nurse raised their only child on the move, and by the time she was nine, Lita Ford had landed in Long Beach, California. The London-born guitarist who would go on to shred through glam metal’s loudest decade spent her first American years nowhere near a stage. Born Lita Rossana Ford on September 19, 1958, she turns 68 in 2026, and the distance between that birth and the Billboard Hot 100 feels absurd until you hear the riffs.
Early guitar discipline
Her father Harry Lenard Ford and mother Isabella Benvenuto didn’t push her toward music at first — but once she showed an interest, they made sure she practiced. Inspired by Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Lita got her first guitar at eleven and was told to play it even when she didn’t want to. That discipline stuck. By thirteen, she was teaching herself Hendrix, Beck, and every Deep Purple part she could find on record.
The first rock concert of her life was Black Sabbath. Lita was thirteen, and something clicked — not just fandom, but a career decision. She knew exactly what she was going to do after that show. Her parents’ insistence on daily practice suddenly made sense to her, and she threw herself into the instrument with a focus most teenagers reserve for rebellion.
Joining The Runaways
At sixteen, in 1975, impresario Kim Fowley put Lita Ford into The Runaways, an all-female rock band that would become both a media magnet and a genuine touring act. As lead guitarist, she supplied the riffs while the group recorded their first album in 1976 and built a reputation through relentless live work. The press couldn’t look away, but neither could the audiences.
By 1979 Lita had left The Runaways, and the solo years began — though not smoothly. She signed with Mercury Records and steered toward glam metal, a sound that took most of the 1980s to refine. The shift wasn’t overnight, and her early solo records show a guitarist working between heavy metal’s aggression and glam’s hooks.
The 1989 breakthrough
The breakthrough came in 1989 with “Close My Eyes Forever,” a duet with Ozzy Osbourne that lodged itself in the American top ten. The song’s melody and the pairing of two hard rock lifers gave Lita her biggest hit, and it arrived at the exact moment her solo style had settled into something radio could embrace without sanding off the edge.
That late-1980s peak wasn’t a fluke. Lita Ford had spent fifteen years on the road and in studios, first with The Runaways and then under her own name. Her mezzo-soprano range gave the material a weight that pure shouters couldn’t match, and her guitar work — rooted in Blackmore, Hendrix, and Beck — kept the songs from becoming pure pop metal.
The records from that era sit in a strange place: too heavy for pop, too polished for purists. But the Mercury releases from the late 1980s and early 1990s capture a guitarist who learned her craft by copying Ritchie Blackmore in a Long Beach bedroom and ended up duetting with Ozzy Osbourne on national radio.
She never stopped being the kid who heard Black Sabbath and decided, at thirteen, that this was the life. Lita Ford still plays those riffs she taught herself from Deep Purple and Jeff Beck records, and the fact that she turns 68 in 2026 only makes the story louder.