During the Clone Wars, Owen Lars lived on the Tatooine farm run by his father Cliegg, who had married Shmi Skywalker, a Mos Espa slave. After Owen’s stepmother was kidnapped by Tusken Raiders, his stepbrother Anakin Skywalker returned to Tatooine in search of her, and was introduced to Owen and his girlfriend, Beru Whitesun.

Cliegg tried to tell Anakin that his mother was dead – few Tatooine settlers could survive a month in Tusken captivity. But Anakin insisted Shmi was alive, and borrowed Owen’s swoop to search for her.

A haunted Anakin returned with his mother’s body, which he laid to rest in the small Lars graveyard before leaving Tatooine. Owen Lars would never see his stepbrother again – though his life would be shaped by Anakin and his legacy.

At the end of the Clone Wars, the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi brought Anakin’s infant son Luke to Owen and Beru. The young couple agreed to raise the boy as their own. Owen came to love Luke, and feared that his secret past would be a source of danger to him. To protect Luke, he forbade Obi-Wan to visit and told the boy his father had been a navigator on a spice freighter.

Beru knew what Owen refused to accept – that Luke had too much of his father in him to be content with life on the farm. Luke burned to see the galaxy, and grew increasingly frustrated as Owen found new reasons for the boy to delay his application to the Imperial Academy, following his friends off Tatooine.

Life on Tatooine was hard, with moisture farmers struggling to eke out the smallest profit. To help on the farm, Owen bought a pair of droids – C-3PO and R2-D2 – from a clan of Jawas. Owen didn’t know the droids were refugees from a battle between rebel and Imperial forces, or that R2-D2 was carrying secret information of utmost importance to the Empire.

The morning after his purchase, Owen woke up to find Luke and the droids gone. He wearily got about the business of the farm, already fuming at the thought that Luke would forget he needed to repair the condensers on the south range.

It was the last day of Owen’s life. Stormtroopers searching for C-3PO and R2-D2 tracked the droids to the Jawa scavengers who’d found them and learned to whom they’d been sold. They arrived at the Lars farm and interrogated Owen and Beru, killing them and leaving the homestead in flames.