Sunrise, Sunset

"Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born screenwriter and novelist who, as the writing member of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team, won two Academy Awards for adaptations of genteel, class-conscious E. M. Forster novels, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.

   Mrs. Jhabvala won an Oscar for “A Room With a View” (1986), with Maggie Smith [...] and Helena Bonham Carter. James Ivory, the director with whom she collaborated, said the cause was complications of a pulmonary condition.
   Mrs. Jhabvala (pronounced JOB-vahla) was already well established as an author when she began her screenwriting career with the producer Ismail Merchant and Mr. Ivory. Her 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, about an Englishwoman exploring a family scandal in India, received the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor.
     She wrote the screenplay for the Merchant Ivory version in 1983 as well."
— Anita Gates, The New York Times
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"Film-ifying"

"E. M. Forster is probably best known in recent days, ironically, through the film adaptations of his novels. I say ironically, because during his life, he abhorred the idea of someone film-ifying what he'd intended for print. He refused to let anyone adapt his novels for the screen; and I think his adamance at this made a lot of sense. (If you were an author, would you trust someone else taking what you'd written for a book and making it into something other than a book? Sometimes it just doesn't work out the way you expect.)
     Yet I myself was introduced to his work through film, and as a Forster enthusiast, I fully applaud the efforts of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in keeping a very loyal adaptation, for Howards End in particular. The Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala team also did A Room with a View and Maurice; David Lean tackled A Passage to India, and Charles Sturridge, along with Derek Granger and Tim Sullivan, adapted Where Angels Fear to Tread.
     The only novel that remains is The Longest Journey, and then there are the many short stories EMF wrote that still enjoy 'singularity.'"
— Only Connect…
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You can buy all of E. M. Forster's books here...