Last December, we shared a photo of a grown man with one small clue underneath: “His actor father has played rebels and the president, hmmm…” Thousands of you clicked to find out who he was. The rebels were the giveaway for a lot of people, because the same actor who flew the Millennium Falcon as Han Solo also moved into the Oval Office twice, first as President James Marshall in Air Force One in 1997 and again as President Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Brave New World in 2025.
The man in that photo is Ben Ford, Harrison Ford’s oldest son, and he turned 60 this September. He is the first of Harrison Ford’s kids, five children raised across three marriages, with more than 34 years between the oldest and the youngest. Ford, now 84, has never claimed he got fatherhood exactly right, and the lives his children have built have surprisingly little to do with Hollywood.
Who Is The Son Our Readers Were Looking At?
Ben was born on September 22, 1966, to Ford and his first wife, Mary Marquardt, whom he married in 1964. Those were lean years. His father was still more than a decade away from Star Wars and famously took carpentry jobs to keep the family going, but Ben remembers that there was always good food at home. “He would make this grilled cheese sandwich for me on whole wheat,” he told Mashed in 2024.
Cooking was never the plan. Baseball ran Ben’s life until an injury in his twenties ended it, he explained on CBS This Morning in 2015, and it was his mother who quietly pointed him somewhere new. “When I hurt myself, I got a couple of my mom’s Jacques Pépin videos,” he recalled, as People reported. He worked his way through serious kitchens, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Campanile in Los Angeles, before opening his own place.
That place was Ford’s Filling Station, a gastropub that opened in Culver City in 2006. A year later he faced Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. The Culver City restaurant closed in 2014 after eight years, and a later version inside the J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live has closed too, but travelers can still eat at the Ford’s Filling Station in Terminal 5 at Los Angeles International Airport. He also wrote the cookbook Taming the Feast, and he has two sons, Ethan and Waylon, with his ex-wife, Emily.
The bond with his father is easy to see in the rare family photos Ben has shared over the years, and the two still cook together. “There’s just a lot of chicken being grilled when we get together,” Ben told Mashed, before giving away one of his dad’s table habits: “He eats off people’s plates.” Ben was not the only boy in that first household, though.
What Became Of Ben’s Little Brother, Willard?
Willard Ford was born on May 14, 1969, which makes him 57, and he is the son who went into business rather than kitchens or film. He earned a degree in American studies at UC Santa Cruz, according to both People and Hello!, and then built a run of Los Angeles ventures. He founded Strong Sports Gym, and he owned the Kim Sing Theatre, an event space he put up for sale in 2014 after it had hosted events for BMW, Nike, the Grammys and even Star Wars. Wikipedia also credits him with the streetwear label Ludwig Clothing. He has two children of his own.
Willard was still a boy when everything changed for his father. Star Wars arrived in 1977, and Ford and Mary Marquardt divorced in 1979, just as the work started pouring in. Ford has been unusually honest about what that success cost at home. “If I’d been less successful, I’d probably be a better parent,” he told Esquire in 2023, as Fox News reported, adding that “the more constant gardener is the better parent.”
By then he had already found the woman who would give him his next two children, and she was a writer whose most famous creation is still loved by every family that ever watched a glowing finger light up a movie screen.
What Are Malcolm And Georgia Doing Now?
Ford married screenwriter Melissa Mathison in March 1983, the same season her script for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial earned her an Oscar nomination. She also wrote The Black Stallion and Kundun, and the couple had two children before they separated in 2000 and divorced in 2004. When Mathison died of cancer on November 4, 2015, at 65, Steven Spielberg said her heart “shined with generosity and love and burned as bright as the heart she gave E.T.,” as ET reported.
Their son, Malcolm, was born on October 3, 1987, and is now 39. He became a musician, not an actor, and fronted the rock and blues band The Dough Rollers with his friend Jack Byrne, the son of Ellen Barkin and Gabriel Byrne. The band opened for Bob Dylan and Queens of the Stone Age. Malcolm keeps such a low profile that it made news this March when he turned up beside Ben at his food stall at the Ojai Food + Wine Festival, according to Hello! Ben’s partner, Dru Mouser, posted a photo of the two brothers with a two-word caption: “Good genes!”
Georgia, Ford’s only daughter, was born on June 30, 1990, and is now 36. She became an actress, with roles in American Milkshake in 2013 and True Story in 2015. She also lived with seizures from childhood, and doctors at NYU Langone diagnosed her epilepsy in 2008. Ford spoke about her publicly in 2016 and told the New York Daily News, “She’s my hero. I love her.” That spring he auctioned the jacket he wore as Han Solo in The Force Awakens for epilepsy research, saying that “unlike the cynical Han Solo, I’ve got a good feeling about this.” It sold for $191,000, TheWrap reported.
How Did Liam Become The Youngest Ford?
The youngest arrived in Ford’s life by a different road. Calista Flockhart adopted Liam as a single mother in January 2001, a year before she met Ford at the 2002 Golden Globes. The couple married in Santa Fe on June 15, 2010, and Ford later adopted Liam, who is now 25 and keeps almost entirely out of the spotlight. Ford flew him to college on his own plane in 2020, and he and Flockhart were in the crowd when Liam graduated from Amherst College in May 2023.
Liam also talked his father into one of his bolder adventures. When Ellen DeGeneres asked in 2019 why Ford had finally gone skydiving during a family trip to New Zealand, he answered, “Probably because Liam said he wanted to do it.” Would they jump again? “We’re talking about it,” Ford said. “We’re not talking to his mother about it.”
Raising a child in his sixties felt different, and Ford knew why. “My older children have taught me a lot,” he told The Independent in 2010. “I’ve got five kids in total, so it’s not my first rodeo.” Flockhart, whose marriage to Ford is now in its 17th year, has seen that growth up close.
What Did Harrison Ford’s Kids Learn From Him?
“He’s such a good father to his kids now,” Flockhart told The New York Times, as Fox News reported in 2024. “I love his kids, my stepkids.” She believes he simply matured with each round of children, and the five of them, a chef, an entrepreneur, a musician, an actress and a private young man who once talked his dad into skydiving, have grown up into very different people.
Still, the one who started it all may have put it best. On Father’s Day in 2019, Ben posted a photo of the two of them grilling side by side, the son from our December puzzle standing shoulder to shoulder with the face so many of us grew up watching. “My dad or pops,” he wrote, as People reported. “He taught me resiliency as a young father and later helped give me the courage to pursue my dreams.”
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