Biography of James Ivory :- American Film Director. Educated in a bourgeois, catholic and liberal family, he studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Oregon.
Not satisfied with his training and attracted by the cinema, he moved to Paris with the intention of entering the School of Cinematography. But then began the Korean War and returned to California where he would complete his studies.
To do the practice of end of race chooses Venice and there begins to shoot Venice: Theme and Variations.
Biography of James Ivory
- Born:- 7 June 1928 (age 89), Berkeley, California, United States
- Book:- James Ivory in Conversation,
- Education:- USC School of Cinematic Arts(1957), University of Oregon
- Awards:- BAFTA Award for Best Film, BAFTA Fellowship
When he finishes filming, he travels to India, where his trajectory will find the definitive way. There is the short film The Sword and the Flute (1959), which Ismail Merchant has the opportunity to see.
See Also: Biography of Shah Abdullah
Merchant convinces him to found a production company with which to make films in English there in India and then distribute them to other countries.
Merchant-Ivory will be a success so that under its title will produce more than fifteen films to date. A novel by Ruth Prawer Jhalbvala will lead to her first film and will add one more member to the association.
This film, titled The Householder , tells the arrival into adulthood of a Hindu who contemplates the world with naivety.
Ivory’s filmography is marked by two constants: India and literary adaptation. His first four titles: The Householder (1963), Shakespeare Wallah (1965) -which brings together in his story several Tama Janowitz stories about young people from different parts of the USA.
New York target forward triumphantly, The Guru (1968), which was shot more budget thanks to the co – production of 20th Century Fox, and Bombay Talkie (1970), are not great works, but serve to go strengthening The trio that will be consolidated later.
The following two titles are: Wild (1972) and Wild Party (1975), which includes the scene starring Fatty (Roscoe Arbuckle) when closed its Hollywood silent period. In Roseland (1977) Ivory reworks with screenwriter Ruth Jhalbvala after the parenthesis of the previous two films.
Compose three episodes that take place in New York and is a caveat to his return to the Hindu themes that will result in titles like Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s pictures (1978) and Autobiography of a Princess (1975), which is a Television production.
From then on he began his relationship with the adaptations of English and American novels, including two works by Henry James: The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984); An autobiographical novel by Jean Rhis, Quartet (1981) and East and West (1983), written by his usual screenwriter Ruth Prawer.
In 1980 she directed Jane Austen in Manhattan , an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Sir Charles Gradison. This film, along with New York Slaves (1988), stars Bernardette Peters, form the only two non-period titles of the last fifteen years of his filmography.
The joint recognition of the public and critic, and therefore its first success, arrives in 1985 with a room with vistas , first of its three adaptations of EM Forster, along with Maurice (1987) and Return to Howards End (1992).
Immediately after having released a room with a view in the US, Ivory had the opportunity to get in touch with the United Artists to shoot a movie with them.
While Ruth Prawer wrote the screenplay for Slaves in New York , Ivory contacted the scriptwriter Kit Hesketh Harvey and began to prepare Maurice . The risk was evident after the reception of a room with a view but Ivory,
From the beginning he tried to make Maurice the counterpoint to his previous film, not only for the characters, but also for the environment – which in this story that was rolling now became more lugubrious and gray – in keeping with the clandestinely that the characters needed to His love affair.
Forster had written Maurice between 1913 and 1914 and had turned his confrontation to English society through homosexuality and the mixture of classes, data of autobiographical dye.
The novel was not published until 1971, after the death of its author, and Ivory wanted to maintain a fidelity to the text that would be translated in the screen even in the utilization of Tchaikovski Pathetics , to which was referred in the novel.
Maurice discovered the actor Hugh Grant, with whom Ivory contacted through an advertising agent. Although this film was more somber than the previous one, the director did not want that it was exempt of humor, task that fell on Grant that at that time worked like animator in nightclubs.
In 1990, Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, star in Waiting for Mr. Bridge , a script written from two parallel novels in which author Evan S. Connell tells the same story from two different points of view. What remains of the day , like Return to Howards End , is marked by the presence of a mansion.
Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it narrates the life of a butler who has the opportunity to work under the command of two different lords – one English and one American, with the differences that this entails – and to attend the period between the two world wars of So intense that you will lose the opportunity to enjoy a life of your own.
In 1994 Jefferson directed in Paris , an absolutely anecdotal film in which it does not transcend even the framework in which it is developed, which is the prelude to the French Revolution.
Nick Nolte gives Jefferson life before becoming President of the USA. Greta Scacchi is about to be her lover, but is overcome by a teenage mulatto to whom Jefferson would remain united once took the presidency and Gwynneth Palthrow is the daughter of Jefferson, to which all sorts of events and feelings confuse to him. Jefferson in Paris went through the charts without pain or glory.
All the opposite to his next film, Surviving to Picasso , that was surrounded of controversy already from before starting the shooting.
The heirs of Picasso never approved the script, which treated the artist as a cruel egotist and despot. Anthony Hopkins plays Picasso and, apart from the psychology of the character, achieved an extraordinary physical resemblance, including movements. In the film appear several pictures, but none of Picasso, because the family did not allow it.
Ivory’s cinema, although in its personal line, is winning every time to a wider audience. The awards, the delicacy and rigor with which the period films, his specialization and the excellent actors with whom he works, have accustomed the audience to his films.
This, along with the recognition of the critic has made him one of the most consolidated directors of the current cinema.
