Celebrity Biographies
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a regular at the cinema of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, died on April 3, 2013, at her New York residence as a result of a lung disorder. She, an expert in adaptations behind titles like “The Remains of the Day” and “Return to Howards End”, she was 85 years old. She won 2 Oscars.
Born on May 7, 1927 in Cologne, Germany, into a Jewish family, Ruth Prawer’s parents had to flee to the United Kingdom when the Nazis rose to power. In 1951 she graduated with a BA from the University of London, and married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian architect.
Right after getting married, Cyrus and Ruth moved to New Delhi, India, where they had three daughters. She began to write novels like “To Whom She Will”, “Nature of Passion” or “Esmond in India”, which mostly dealt with her new life in the Asian country. With “East and West”, later adapted to the cinema, she won the Booker Prize.
One of her books, “The Householder”, had impressed producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory , who decided to offer her a contract to write the film adaptation herself. Although she did not have any experience in the Seventh Art, Jhabvala impressed Ivory and Merchant, leading to a partnership that would span half a century over twenty films. She highlights The Europeans , based on a text by Henry James , as does The Bostonians . Or Quartet , about a showgirl whose husband is arrested for art theft.
“We have a strange marriage between the three of us. I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth a Jewish German and James Ivory an American Protestant. Someone described us as a triune god of cinema, but I should have said that we are a three-headed monster,” he said. Ismail Merchant .
But Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ‘s great specialty was the versions of EM Forster novels . She won an Oscar in 1987 for A Room with a View , and another in 1993 for Howards End , both books by this author. She got a third nomination for The Remains of the Day , which was based on a play by Kazuo Ishiguro .
After a couple of biopics of historical figures ( Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso ), the films by the Jhabvala-Merchant-Ivory trio no longer have the impact of yesteryear, despite the fact that A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries , The Golden Cup and Le divorce maintain the level of quality. Following the loss of Merchant, who died in 2005 of a stomach ulcer, Jhabvala wrote his final screenplay, also for Ivory, The City of Your Final Destination , an adaptation of a Peter Cameron novel about a Kansas student writing a biography of a Latin American writer.