International financier and multi-millionaire, Olympian, cellist, A-list networker, president of the World Bank and Middle East peace envoy - James Wolfensohn was a modern renaissance man.
It's doubtful if any Australian, except Rupert Murdoch, has had greater global influence.
The title of Mr Wolfensohn's autobiography said it all ... A global life: My journey among the rich and poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank.
James David Wolfensohn, who died on Thursday aged 86, was born in Sydney on December 1, 1933.
His parents, Hyman and Dora, arrived from Britain in 1928. Why they left the good life and came to Sydney on the eve of the depression has never been explained.
In their two-bedroom Edgecliff flat, money was a constant worry and pushing their son academically a near-obsession.
James Wolfensohn had to drop out of Harry Hopman's junior tennis squad, which included future giant Ken Rosewall, to concentrate on school, and was at Sydney University just after turning 16.
At first he floundered, socially and academically. But he ended up with arts and law degrees, a fencing talent that took him to the 1956 Olympics, and a position with leading law firm Allen Allen and Hemsley.
By Mr Wolfensohn's account, a turning point came when he stumbled over some commercial terms and his senior colleague snapped: "Why the hell don't you go to Harvard Business School?"
He did, and from that point investing became his focus. It was there, too, that he met his future wife, Elaine Botwinick.
After a stint in Europe he returned to Australia and was soon a partner in the brokerage and investment house Ord Minnett. From there he moved to run corporate finance at merchant bank Darlings.
In 1968 he moved to London as a director of the British merchant bank Schroders just as a true global financial market was developing.
He was one of the first to recognise and exploit the tax potential of the Eurodollar and, from it, a great range of financial instruments. Two years later he went to New York to run Schroders' American operations before returning to London as group chief executive.
Gough Whitlam asked him for advice on borrowing billions of dollars through Pakistani loans dealer Tirath Khemlani.
Mr Wolfensohn thought Mr Khemlani was a con man. He wrote in his autobiography: "I spent a couple of days trying to talk Whitlam out of working with him and departed feeling very pleased with myself, believing I had succeeded." He hadn't, of course.
He quit Schroders after being passed over for the chairmanship because, or so he was told, he was neither British nor an aristocrat.
This led to a return to New York as head of corporate business with Salomon Brothers. For the first time, Mr Wolfensohn earned seriously big money.
He was at the centre of the Chrysler bailout, the then-biggest financial rescue in corporate history.
After five years he left, a wealthy man, to start his own corporate finance business.
By then he'd become an American citizen, a necessary step for consideration as president of the World Bank.
His first tilt at the position was unsuccessful and instead Mr Wolfensohn focused on his boutique investment company which attracted big clients, including, from Australia, Westpac, Lend Lease, BHP and Westfield.
However, his forays into venture capital didn't all have happy endings.
He and Kerry Packer had been friends for years and were in various partnerships. According to Mr Wolfensohn, after Mr Packer's near-fatal 1990 heart attack, there was a falling out, and "the rift was total. I never spoke to Kerry again".
In 1995, after an hour-long interview with president Bill Clinton, Mr Wolfensohn got the job he'd sought 14 years earlier, and for the next decade was president of the World Bank.
World Bank is an umbrella term to cover a group of agencies which invest in social and economic infrastructure in poor countries.
Mr Wolfensohn is widely regarded as one of the bank's most influential and controversial presidents.
With his energy and endless travelling, often to some of the world's most desperate countries, he was a tonic to an organisation some felt had become too inward-looking.
He championed the relief of poverty, including debt relief for poor countries. He talked to the hitherto ignored NGOs, many of whom had become bitter critics of the bank, and openly attacked corruption.
In 1997, he's recorded, then President Suharto of Indonesia chided him for taking corruption so seriously, saying: "What you call corruption, I call family values".
But he was also seen as temperamental and intolerant of criticism. Critics say he actually increased the bank's bureaucracy.
As his time at the bank was ending in 2005 the George W Bush administration asked him to oversee the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an agreement on the territory's future between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Many of his efforts to develop an economic future for the territory collapsed, partly because of the failure to get a deal on Gaza-Israel border crossings.
In 2006 he founded the Wolfensohn Centre for Development to work on global development problems.
Mr Wolfensohn's interests went beyond business, economic development and the intractable problems of Palestine.
Music was always a great love and he became a competent cellist who performed at Carnegie Hall in New York.
He worked voluntarily with great American cultural institutions like the US Customs House in New York, Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington and think tanks like the Brookings Institute.
He seemed to know everyone who mattered - the Clintons, Kennedys and Rockefellers, Yasser Arafat and Kofi Annan, musicians like Zubin Mehta and Vladimir Ashkenazy, bankers from Paul Volcker to Siegmund Warburg.
Mr Wolfensohn never lost his affection for Australia and at the age of the age of 76, following a change to US law to accommodate dual citizenship, regained his Australian citizenship.
Australian Associated Press
