Nobody ever accused Robert Halmi Sr. of thinking small. With more than 200 TV miniseries and films to his credit, Halmi produced sagas that were as outsize and dramatic as his own life.
Excited about the miniseries potential of Hannibal’s trip over the Alps, he was once asked where he’d find the elephants.
“That’s easy!” he said. “I already have the elephants.”
And he well might have.
At one point, Halmi, a Budapest-born impresario who introduced millions of TV viewers to classic stories like “The Odyssey,” “Don Quixote” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” owned a 1,000-acre game preserve in Kenya as well as a villa in the south of Spain, a home in London and an 89-foot yacht named “Bad Caroline,” after his wife.