Skip to footer

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 'A Room With a View' screenwriter, dies

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won two Acadamy Awards for screenwriting for her adaptations of the E.M. Forster novels "Howards End" and "A Room With a View." Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a novelist, too, and won the Man Booker Prize,

|
(AP Photo/Merchant Ivory Productions)
Oscar-winning screenwriter and award-winning novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, center, with film director and producer, Ismail Merchant, left, and director, James Ivory in a studio. Jhabvala passed on Wednesday, April 3, 2013.
  • By Sandy Cohen Associated Press

| Los Angeles

Oscar-winning screenwriter and award-winning novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has died. She was 85.

Firoza Jhabvala said Wednesday that her mother died in New York after a long illness.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a longtime member of Merchant Ivory Productions, writing 22 films over four decades. She won two Academy Awards for her adaptations of the E.M. Forster novels "Howard's End" and "A Room With a View." She was also nominated for adapting 1993's "The Remains of the Day." All three films were also best-picture contenders.

"Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has 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," said the company's director of development, Neil Jesuele. "The passing of our two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter is a significant loss to the global film community."

Jhabvala was also recognized for her fiction, receiving  the Man Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary honor, for her 1975 novel, "Heat and Dust." Her stories appeared in The New Yorker magazine, the most recent just last month.

Jhabvala is survived by Firoza Jhabvala and two other daughters, her husband Cyrus Jhabvala, and six grandchildren.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 'A Room With a View' screenwriter, dies
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0404/Ruth-Prawer-Jhabvala-A-Room-With-a-View-screenwriter-dies
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe