Thursday, March 6, 2008

Mini Biography

Charles Saatchi was born into an Iraqi-Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq (the name "Saatchi" means "Watchmaker" in Persian, Turkish and Iraqi Arabic). The family moved to Hampstead, London, when he was four and he attended Christ's College in Finchley, a suburb in North London. During this time he developed an obsession with US pop culture, including the music of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. He also manifested his enthusiasm for collections, building up from Superman comics to jukeboxes. He has described as "life changing" the experience of viewing a Jackson Pollock painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1970 he started the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi with his brother Maurice; which by 1986 had grown to be the largest agency in the world, with over 600 offices. Successful campaigns in the UK included Silk Cut cigarettes and the promotion of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher through the slogan "Labour Isn't Working". Eventually, he and his brother Maurice departed the agency and together founded the rival M&C Saatchi agency, taking the huge British Airways advertising account from their former company.

He is a notorious recluse, even hiding from clients when they visited his agency's offices, and has, until recently, never granted interviews. His first wife, Doris Lockhart, became known during their marriage as an art and design journalist, with particular knowledge of minimalism; his second, Kay Hartenstein, was a Conde Nast journalist. He married celebrity cook Nigella Lawson (his third wife) in 2003 and they live in London with her two children Cosima and Bruno by journalist John Diamond.

*Taken from Wikipedia

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