Merchant-Ivory

Merchant-Ivory, generic name given to the eclectic group of films produced by the partnership of the producer Ismail Merchant (1936-2005) and the director James Ivory (1928- ). Ivory, born in Berkeley, California, met Merchant, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) but partly educated in New York, when the former was visiting India in 1960, and the pair began to work together. Their first feature film, The Householder (1963), was adapted from a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who became their customary screenwriter.

Shakespeare Wallah (1965), a study of an acting troupe in post-Raj India, remained their most highly regarded film until Heat and Dust (1983), from Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Intervening films, made in adverse financial circumstances in India, the United States, or Britain, drew less attention. Of the team’s later films, the best known include The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), and The Golden Bowl (2000), from the novels of Henry James, and the classic E. M. Forster adaptations A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992). The Remains of the Day (1993), based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, was also highly esteemed; like Howards End, the film utilized the talents of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Jefferson in Paris (1995) and Surviving Picasso (1996), starring Hopkins as the artist, were followed by the comedy of cultural difference Le Divorce (2003), from the novel by Diane Johnson. The White Countess, released in 2006, was the final Merchant-Ivory film completed before Ismail Merchant's death.

In his later years Merchant also turned to directing; he followed up his feature debut, In Custody (1993), with The Proprietor (1996), starring Jeanne Moreau as a writer haunted by her past, Cotton Mary (1999), and The Mystic Masseur (2001), adapted from the novel by V. S. Naipaul. Merchant-Ivory were awarded the BAFTA Academy Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in 2002.