Arts & Culture

I was saddened to read that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the twice Academy Award-winning
screenwriter, died on April 3.  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay for my
favourite film, A Room with a View, based on the novel by E.M. Forster.  The film
is about Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman, who in the early 1900s finds love
while on holiday in Italy.  In 1987, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won an Oscar for
A Room with a View for best adapted screenplay.

A Room with a View has such an extraordinary cast: Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy;
Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy's chaperone; Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil, Lucy's
fiancé; Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish,  a romance novelist; the incomparable late
Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson; and Julian Sands as his son, George, and Lucy's new
love interest in Florence. 

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was an established author before she began her screenwriting
career with producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory.  She received The
Booker Prize for her 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, which tells the story of a married
Englishwoman in 1920s colonial India who falls in love with an Indian prince.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala also wrote the screenplay of the novel for Ismail Merchant
and James Ivory.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received her second Oscar in 1993 for Howards End, which
examined Edwardian class consciousness.  Other films which Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
adapted include Mr. and Mrs. Bridge and The Remains of the Day, amongst many others.

Truly a citizen of the world, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's background, as well as her writing
talent, made her ideally suited to look at society from the outside in.  Born in 1927 in
Cologne, Germany to Jewish paren'ts, in 1939 she fled with her family to London where
they lived through the Blitz.  Ruth studied English literature at the University of London,
and in 1951 she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect.  She moved to Delhi
where she stayed for the next twenty-five years, raising her three daughters and
writing novels.  When she moved to New York in the 1970s, Ruth's life came full
circle when she met people with whom she had gone to school in Cologne, when
she was a child.