Life and Career
Saltzman was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, the son of Jewish immigrants. He ran away from home at the age of 15, according to daughter Hilary Saltzman in the Ian Fleming Foundation documentary Harry Saltzman: Showman. About the age of 17 he joined a circus and traveled with them for some years. By the beginning of World War II in 1939 he was serving in the Canadian Army in France. His career in the war may have included some intelligence work.
After the war, Saltzman ended up in Paris, where he met a refugee from Romania whom he married, Jaquie. He worked as a talent scout for European productions on stage, television and in film. He accumulated a huge number of entertainment business contacts and became the person to turn to when someone had a talent or production problem. Despite his ambition, those were lean years for the Saltzman family, according to son Steven. Saltzman gradually got more successful at producing stage plays. He moved the family of four to Britain in the mid-fifties where he again produced theater, and then entered the film business, producing The Iron Petticoat (1956), the cinematic adaptation of a play - "The landmark film introduces a new genre, the kitchen sink movie". Saltzman started Woodfall Film Productions with Tony Richardson and John Osborne and produced other critically acclaimed social realism dramas such as 1959's Look Back in Anger and 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Saltzman then began casting around for something which would be more profitable than these modestly successful but high quality films.
In early 1961, excited by reading the James Bond novel Goldfinger, he made a bid to land film rights to the character. Saltzman co-founded Danjaq, S.A. with Albert R. Broccoli in 1962. It was a holding company responsible for the copyright and trademarks of James Bond on screen, and the parent company of Eon Productions, which they also set up as a film production company for the Bond films. The moniker Danjaq is a combination of Broccoli's and Saltzman's wives' first names, Dana and Jacqueline.
In 1975 after unrelated financial difficulties, Saltzman sold his 50% stake in Danjaq to United Artists Corporation. Concurrently, his beloved wife Jaquie was diagnosed with terminal cancer; his health also declined and he became depressed, sold the English country mansion where he loved to hold production meetings in the rooftop pool, and moved to Florida. As related by friend Roger Moore, Jaquie died while The Spy Who Loved Me was shooting, which places her death in late 1976 or early 1977. Saltzman all but retired from the movie business thereafter. He was persuaded back from retirement to produce Nijinsky in 1980 and the 1988 British-Italian-Yugoslavian co-production Time of the Gypsies. He had long desired to produce a film on the life of Vaslav Nijinsky, based on biographies, the rights to which he had acquired in the 1960s. Harry was the executive producer when the film Nijinsky was finally made.
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