Director James Ivory can be thanked for film classics such as A Room with a View, The Remains of the Day, Life with Picasso and The French Divorce. He preferred to screen great literature and stories about hidden love. Today he celebrates his 95th birthday.
James Ivory had to wait a long time for his first Oscar. When he took the stage with a cane in March 2018, he was 89 years old and is still the oldest Oscar recipient in the history of this award. Despite this, he did not receive the Golden Statue as a director, but as a screenwriter of the film Call me by your nameto adapt the story of a gay love romance.
“It’s a universal story of first love that everyone can understand, whether they’re gay, straight or somewhere in between,” underlined Ivory in his acceptance speech. So far, he has been nominated for an Oscar three times as a director, but each time he was left empty-handed.
At the New York Film Festival last fall, Ivory premiered his “deeply personal” documentary titled A Cooler Climate. The previously unreleased 16mm recordings were made on his trip to Afghanistan in 1960, which turned his life upside down. In the documentary, he also reflects on growing up in the US state of Oregon, his homosexuality and the beginnings of his film career, which was marked by a fateful meeting.
A partnership in art and lifeHe met in New York Ismail Merchant, an ambitious producer eight years younger. The Indian-born producer became his film and life partner.
Inseparable from them was the British writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the daughter of Polish Jews who spent her childhood in Germany. She wrote almost all the screenplays for the movie-successful couple. With Merchant, Ivory founded a company Merchant Ivory Productions, which also entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running independent film company. Merchant, 68, died in 2005, Jhabvala, 85, in 2013.
The famous trio’s first film together, an Indian drama The Householder, directed by Ivory, was in theaters in 1963. Far from Hollywood, many shorts and feature films followed, often on the theme of Western and Eastern culture and the conflict between tradition and assimilation. Merchant-Ivory’s international breakthrough came in 1979 with the elegant film adaptation of Henry James’s novel Europeans.
He is still planning new projectsIn 2009, Ivory completed his last feature directorial project to date The City of Your Final Destination. He is still active as a producer. At the end of last year, he announced a film biography about the Italian-American pop singer Jimmy Roselli, Frank Sinatra’s traveling companion. Just a few weeks before his birthday today, however, he unveiled a new project in which he himself will step in front of the camera and tell his story.
In a planned documentary portrait titled James Ivory: In Search of Love and Beauty directed by Christopher Manning, stars such as Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Hugh Grant, who often filmed with Ivory, will share their anecdotes about working with Ivory.
Source: Rtvslo