James IVORY

James Ivory's name immediately conjures up glowing images of Edwardian England, where elegant figures in beautiful costumes move through cluttered drawing rooms or picturesque landscapes and, as the narrative unfolds, the hypocrisies underlying Britain's class system are gradually revealed. Few directors have become quite as synonymous with one particular style of film-making as Ivory, so that his name is a byword for tasteful period literary adaptations.

Ironically, for a director associated with as British a genre as the so-called ‘heritage film’, Ivory was born in Berkeley, California on 7 June 1928. After graduating from the University of Oregon, he attended film school at USC and then began his career making short documentaries in the late 1950s. He met the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and in 1961 they formed the production company Merchant-Ivory with the intention of making English language films in India which would play to an international market. Their first project together was The Householder (1963) based on a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (born in Germany of Polish parents, educated in England and Indian by marriage) who became the crucial third partner in their team, going on to script most of Ivory's subsequent films. They made three further films in India during the 1960s: Shakespeare Wallah (1965) is an affectionate story of the misadventures of an English theatre troupe on tour; The Guru (1969) is a slightly clumsy critique of the then fashionable western interest in Eastern mysticism with Michael York as an unlikely pop star; and Bombay Talkie (1970) tries to satirise Hindi cinema while itself teetering close to melodrama.