The classical Beurling-Lax-invariant subspace theorem characterizes the full range simply invariant subspacesM of L n 2 as being of the formM=ΘH n 2 where Θ∈L n×n ∞ is a phase function. Here L n 2 is the Hilbert space of measurable ℂn-valued functions on the unit circle {eit|0≤t≤2π} which are square-integrable in norm, H n 2 is the subspace of functions in L n 2 with analytic continuation to the interior of the disk {z‖z|<1}, L n×n 2 is the space of measurable essentially bounded n×n matrix functions on the unit circle, and a phase function Θ is one whose values Θ(eit) are unitary for a.e. t (i.e., Θ(eit) is in the Lie group U(n) a.e.). Halmos extended this to L ∞ 2 . A subspace M⊂L n 2 is said to beinvariant if eit M⊂M,simply invariant if in addition $$\mathop \cap \limits_{k \geqslant 0} $$ eikt M=(0), andfull range if $$\mathop \cup \limits_{N > 0} $$ e−iNt M is dense in L n 2 . In the Beurling-Lax representationM=ΘH n 2 ,M uniquely determines Θ up to a unitary constant factor on the right if one insists that Θ(eit)∈U(n). If one demands only that Θ(eit) ∈ GL(n,ℂ) (the group of invertible n×n complex matrices), however, there is considerably more freedom; in fact ΘH n 2 =Θ1H n 2 where Θ1 ΘF and F∈L n×n ∞ is outer with inverse F−1∈L n×n ∞ . More generally, we have ΘH n 2 =[Θ1H n ∞ ]− whenever Θ1=ΘF and F is outer with F and F−1 in L n×n 2 . (An F∈L n×n 2 will be said to beouter if FH n ∞ is a dense subset of H n 2 .) In particular one can use this freedom to obtain representationsM=[ΘH n ∞ ]− where the representor Θ has values Θ(eit) in other matrix Lie groups. This program was carried out in accompanying work of the authors [B-H1-4] for the classical simple Lie groups U(m,n), O(p,q), O*(2n), Sp(n,C), Sp(n,R), Sp(p,q), O(n,C), GL(n,R), U*(2n), GL(n,R) and SL(n,C) and many applications were given. In this paper we give a natural theorem for GL(n,ℂ), by introducing the extra structure of preassigning the spaceM x=[ΘH n ∞ ]− as well asM=[ΘH n ∞ ]−. The theorems in [B-H1-4] can be derived by specializing our main result here for GL(n,ℂ) to the various subgroups which we listed.