James Goldsmith

Brother of ecologist Edward Goldsmith (8 November 1928- 21 August 2009) and grand-uncle of Robin Whitehead.

James Goldsmith was born on February 26, 1933 in Paris, France. He was married to Annabel Birley, Ginette Lery and Maria Isabel Patiño.

Richard Ingrams, the editor of "Private Eye", having survived Goldsmith's efforts to sue him for criminal libel, remarked (in the late 1970s) that, whenever Goldsmith was depressed, he liked to cheer himself up by taking a two-week holiday in a fascist dictatorship. The then-recent collapse of the regimes of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal had, Ingrams claimed, upset Goldsmith greatly.

After failing to close down the satire magazine "Private Eye" with his suit for criminal libel in 1976, and having also, as a result of the unpopularity accruing from this action, failed to purchase "The Observer" newspaper, he announced that he would instead publish his own weekly news magazine, to be called "Now!", and intended as a sort of British equivalent to the American "Time". This magazine launched in 1978 and was, for Goldsmith, an even bigger disaster, closing down in less than two years at an enormous loss (rumored to be a seven- or eight-figure sum).

Fathered Zac Goldsmith and Jemima Khan while their mother (the sister of Jane Rayne) was married to her first husband, and he was married to his second wife; they married in 1978. Goldsmith had fathered a son by his second wife before marrying her, then fathered two children by a mistress while married to his third wife.

Terence Stamp and Oliver Stone have both claimed that the character Stamp plays in Stone's film Wall Street (1987) was largely based on Goldsmith. It has also been suggested that the Richard De Vere character played by Peter Bowles in the long-running BBC sitcom To the Manor Born (1979) was suggested by Goldsmith.

Although he was a Member of the European Parliament (for a French constituency), he was strongly opposed to the European Union. To further his anti-EU ideas, he formed the extreme right-wing Referendum Party in Britain and stood for election in the 1997 General Election. He garnered only a little over 1500 votes, and died a few weeks later. The Referendum Party largely collapsed thereafter.

He has been depicted unflatteringly in two TV movies (both of which listed him as "Jimmy Goldsmith" in the cast-list). In The Lavender List (2006), he was played by Patrick Ryecart, and in Lucan (2013), he was played by Alistair Petrie.