JAMES IVORY is a celebrated American director/writer who made 24 feature films over his 44-year partnership with the late Ismail Merchant, through their famed Merchant Ivory Productions. They are best known for a trio of English films, A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day, which between them earned twenty-five Academy Award® nominations, including three for Best Picture and Best Director.

Ivory marks his seventh produced screenplay with Call Me by Your Name (directed by Luca Guadagnino), following five films with two-time Oscar winner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ( Shakespeare Wallah, The Guru, Bombay Talkie, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, and The Divorce); and one with Kit Hesketh-Harvey ( Maurice). These six films were directed by Ivory and made by Merchant Ivory Productions.

 

His work has taken him to France for six feature films, to China for The White Countess (2004), based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and to Argentina for The City of Your Final Destination (2006), based on the novel by Peter Cameron. 

 

Ivory began his filmmaking career in India with Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, his long-time screenwriter, in 1962. There the trio made the classic Shakespeare Wallah and Heat and Dust, based on Jhabvala's Booker Prize-winning novel, Heat and Dust. Some of his other films include: The Householder, Savages, The Wild Party, Autobiography of a Princess, Roseland, The Europeans, Jane Austen in Manhattan, Quartet, The Bostonians, Slaves of New York, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso, and The Golden Bowl.

 

In 1995, Ivory received the D.W. Griffith Award from the Directors Guild of America, their highest lifetime achievement prize.