Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (; 7 May 19273 April 2013) was a British and American novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.
After marrying Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala in 1951 and moving from England to New Delhi, she began to write novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories. After moving to the United States, she started writing screenplays for Merchant Ivory films. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.
Early life and education
Ruth Prawer was born on 7 May 1927 Marcus was a lawyer who had moved to Germany from Poland to escape conscription, and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. Her father was accused of having Communist links, and was arrested and then released. Ruth witnessed the violence unleashed against the Jews during the Kristallnacht.
She became a British citizen in 1948. The following year, her father committed suicide after discovering that 40 members of his family had been murdered during the Holocaust.
In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust, later adapted into a film. That year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace. Cyrus Jhabwala died in Los Angeles in 2014.
Jhabvala "remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life." She wrote in an autobiographical essay, Myself in India (published in London Magazine) that she found the "great animal of poverty and backwardness" made the idea and sensation of India intolerable to her, a "Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis." Her early works in India dwell on the themes of romantic love and arranged marriages and are portraits of the social mores, idealism and chaos of the early decades of independent India. Writing about her in the New York Times, novelist Pankaj Mishra observed that "she was probably the first writer in English to see that India's Westernizing middle class, so preoccupied with marriage, lent itself well to Jane Austenish comedies of manners."
In 2005 she published My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past with illustrations by her husband and the book was described as "her most autobiographical fiction to date".
Merchant Ivory Productions
In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay for their debut The Householder, based on her 1960 novel. During their first encounter, Merchant later said Jhabvala, seeking to avoid them, pretended to be the housemaid when they visited. The film, released by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1963 and starring Shashi Kapoor and Leela Naidu, met with critical praise and marked the beginning of a partnership that resulted in over 20 films.
The Householder was followed by Shakespeare Wallah (1965), another critically acclaimed film. There followed a series of films, including Roseland (1977), Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures (1978), The Europeans (1979), Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), Quartet (1981), The Courtesans of Bombay (1983) and The Bostonians (1984). The Merchant Ivory production of Heat and Dust in 1983 won Jhabvala a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay the following year.
She won her first Academy Award for her screenplay for A Room with a View (1986) and won a second in the same category for Howards End six years later.
In an interview for the British Film Institute, British actor James Wilby said that Jhabvala refused to write the screenplay of the 1987 film Maurice, despite being "the normal writer" for Merchant-Ivory films. The film was based on a posthumously published novel by E. M. Forster which depicted a gay relationship set in Edwardian England. Jhabvala did provide notes for Maurice, but said that she did not wish to write the screenplay as the novel was "sub-Forster and sub-Ivory."
The Merchant-Ivory duo was acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest collaboration between a director and a producer, but Jhabvala was a part of the trio from the very beginning. She introduced the composer Richard Robbins, who went on to score music for almost every production by Merchant Ivory beginning with The Europeans in 1979, to the duo after meeting him while he was the director of Mannes College of Music, New York. Madame Sousatzka (1988) was the one film she wrote that was not produced by Merchant Ivory.
Selected filmography
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!scope="col"| Year
!scope="col"| Title
!scope="col"| Other notes
|-
| 1963 || The Householder || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jhabvala
|-
| 1965 || Shakespeare Wallah || screenplay
|-
| 1969 || The Guru || screenplay
|-
| 1970 || Bombay Talkie|| screenplay
|-
| 1975 || Autobiography of a Princess || written by
|-
| 1977 || Roseland || story and screenplay
|-
| 1978 || Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures || written by
|-
| 1979 || The Europeans ||screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James
|-
| 1980 || Jane Austen in Manhattan || written by, inserted libretto "Sir Charles Grandison" by Jane Austen
|-
| 1981 || Quartet || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jean Rhys
|-
| 1983 || Heat and Dust || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jhabvala
|-
| 1984 || The Bostonians || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James
|-
| 1985 || A Room with a View || screenplay, adapted from the novel by E.M. Forster
|-
| 1988 || Madame Sousatzka || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Bernice Rubens. Directed by John Schlesinger
|-
| 1990 || Mr. & Mrs. Bridge || screenplay, adapted from the novels by Evan S. Connell (Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge)
|-
| 1992 || Howards End || screenplay, adapted from the novel by E.M. Forster
|-
| 1993 || The Remains of the Day || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
|-
| 1995 || Jefferson in Paris || screenplay
|-
| 1996 || Surviving Picasso || screenplay
|-
| 1998 || A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Kaylie Jones
|-
| 2000 || The Golden Bowl || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James
|-
| 2003 || Le Divorce || co-written by James Ivory, adapted from the novel by Diane Johnson
|-
| 2009 || The City of Your Final Destination || screenplay, adapted from the novel by Peter Cameron
|-
|}
Honours and awards
Jhabvala was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List of the 1998 New Years Honours. She was granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant.
She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.
Major film awards and nominations
Academy Awards
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"
! Year
! Category
! Film
! Result
! Ref.
|-
|1986
|rowspan=3|Best Adapted Screenplay
| A Room with a View
|
| rowspan=3|
|-
|1992
| Howards End
|
|-
|1993
| The Remains of the Day
|
|-
|}
Golden Globe Awards
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"
!Year
!Category
!Film
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1992
|rowspan=2|Best Screenplay
| Howards End
|
| rowspan=2|
|-
|1993
| The Remains of the Day
|
|-
|}
British Academy Film Awards
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"
!Year
!Category
!Film
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1983
|rowspan=4|Best Adapted Screenplay
| Heat and Dust
|
|rowspan=4|
|-
|1986
| A Room with a View
|
|-
|1992
| Howards End
|
|-
|1993
| The Remains of the Day
|
|-
|}
Writers Guild of America Awards
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"
!Year
!Category
!Film
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1986 ||rowspan=3|Best Adapted Screenplay || A Room with a View || ||rowspan=4|
|-
|1992 || Howards End ||
|-
|rowspan=2|1993 || The Remains of the Day ||
|-
|| Screen Laurel Award || ||
|-
|}
Other awards
- 1975: Booker Prize – Heat and Dust
Personal life and death
In 1951, Prawer married Cyrus Shavaksha Hormusji Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect and, later, head of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Reacting to her death, Merchant Ivory Productions said that Jhabvala had "been a beloved member of the Merchant Ivory family since 1960, comprising one-third of our indomitable trifecta that included director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant" and that her death was "a significant loss to the global film community".
Literary works
Novels and novellas
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!scope="col"| Year
!scope="col"| Title
!scope="col"| Other notes
|-
| 1955 || To whom she will : a novel || Published in the United States as Amrita
|-
| 1956 || The Nature of Passion ||
|-
| 1958 || Esmond in India ||
|-
| 1960 || The Householder ||
|-
| 1962 || Get Ready for Battle ||
|-
| 1965 || A Backward Place ||
|-
| 1972 || A New Dominion || published in the United States as Travelers
|-
| 1975 || Heat and Dust ||
|-
| 1983 || In Search of Love and Beauty ||
|-
| 1987 || Three Continents ||
|-
| 1993 || Poet and Dancer ||
|-
| 1995 || Shards of Memory ||
|-
|}
Short stories and collections
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Other notes
|-
| 1963 ||Like Birds, Like Fishes||
|-
| 1968 ||A Stronger Climate||
|-
| 1971 ||An Experience of India||
|-
| 1976 ||How I Became a Holy Mother and other stories||
|-
| 1986 || Out of India (novel) |Out of India: Selected Stories||
|-
| 1998 ||East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi||
|-
| 2004 ||My Nine Lives : Chapters of a Possible Past||
|-
|2008
|The Teacher
|"The Teacher". The New Yorker. Volume:84. 28 July 2008
|-
| 2011 ||A Lovesong for India: Tales from East and West||
|-
| 2013 ||A Judge's Will|| |
|-
| 2018 ||At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala||
|}
Critical studies and reviews of Jhabvala's work
;Anthologies and encyclopedias
;Screenwriting
;Other
See also
- List of Academy Award winners and nominees from Great Britain