Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Screenwriter, Dies at 85

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.

The Merchant Ivory filmmaking team:  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, with James Ivory, left, and Ismail Merchant, in 1984.

Mrs. Jhabvala won an Oscar for “A Room With a View” (1986), with Maggie Smith, left, 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.

Over four decades, beginning in 1963, Mrs. Jhabvala made 22 films with Mr. Merchant and Mr. Ivory, all examining culture in one way or another, often one that has vanished. Their first film to attract wide attention was “The Europeans” (1979), based on a Henry James novel set in mid-19th-century New England. Their successful “Room With a View” (1986), based on Forster’s novel about a sheltered young Englishwoman who has a life-changing experience on holiday in Italy, brought Mrs. Jhabvala the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

History repeated itself when she won the same award for Merchant Ivory’s “Howards End” (1992), from a Forster book in which shifting Edwardian social classes cross paths with sometimes cruel results. The team’s collaborations â€" lush and literate, often adapted from classic novels â€" became something of a brand. Visually, a Merchant Ivory film promised “period-perfect costumes and settings” (as The Los Angeles Times wrote); “rich production values and an exquisite attention to detail” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune); or simply “taste” (The Chicago Tribune).

The casts were top-shelf and largely British, laden with stars like Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave. For “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), based on the Evan S. Connell novels, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, spouses in real life, were recruited for the title roles.

But Mrs. Jhabvala’s writing was essential. She contributed sophisticated dialogue and a sharp eye for the nuances of class and ethnicity, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. He also echoed a frequent complaint about Merchant Ivory productions, however, finding in them an “antique-shop sensibility and Anglo-European snob appeal.”

Mr. Merchant, who died in 2005, was Indian, and Mr. Ivory is American, but Mrs. Jhabvala brought a combination of cultural backgrounds to their film collaborations, which also included “The Remains of the Day” (1993), based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, and adaptations of two more Henry James novels, “The Golden Bowl” (2000) and “The Bostonians” (1984).

Ruth Prawer was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, the daughter of Marcus Prawer, a Jewish lawyer who had immigrated there from Poland, and the former Eleanora Cohn. The family fled Hitler in 1939, when Ruth was 12. Unable to acquire visas for the United States, they settled in London instead. In 1948 Marcus Prawer committed suicide, having established that the entire family he had left behind in Poland had died in Nazi camps.

Ruth studied English literature at Queen Mary College, University of London, and received her degree in 1951. That year she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and moved with him to Delhi, where she spent the next quarter-century as a privileged, somewhat reclusive housewife raising three daughters and writing novels about the new culture in which she found herself. Many readers assumed she was Indian.

After she wrote her first book, about a young Indian woman from a good family who falls in love with the wrong man, she sent the manuscript to her mother, who circulated it to British publishers. It was published there in 1955 as “To Whom She Will” and in the United States the next year as “Amrita.” It was followed by “The Nature of Passion” (1956) and “Esmond in India” (1957).

Once Mrs. Jhabvala had an American agent, her short stories began appearing in The New Yorker. Critics praised her satiric voice and compared her to Jane Austen, among others.

She continued to write fiction long after her film career had made her famous, shifting her focus gradually to the immigrant experience and European exiles in America. Her 12th and most recent novel, “My Nine Lives” (2004), posited several alternative paths her life might have taken, in New York, London, Delhi and elsewhere.

Her last short-story collection, “A Lovesong for India,” was published in 2012, and her last story for The New Yorker appeared in its March 25 issue. The story, “The Judge’s Will,” tells of a long-married woman in Delhi dealing with the news, and presence, of her husband’s longtime mistress.

It was her fiction that had brought Mr. Merchant and Mr. Ivory to her door. In the early 1960s, when the two men had made only a handful of films together, they approached Mrs. Jhabvala to write a screenplay based on her novel “The Householder,” about the trials of a young Indian husband. The film, made in India in black and white, was released in the United States in 1963. She shared writing credit with Mr. Ivory for a few of the team’s early films, including “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965), “The Guru” (1969) and “Bombay Talkie” (1970).

In the 1970s Mrs. Jhabvala moved to New York, where, as she wrote in her 1979 essay “Disinheritance,” she felt a connection to her early years.

“I met the people I went to school with in Cologne, with exactly the same background as my own, same heritage, same parentage,” she wrote. “Now here they were living in New York, as Americans, in old West Side apartments.”

Her marriage endured, with Mrs. Jhabvala spending several months a year in India and her husband paying her long visits in New York until he retired and they were able to reunite full time.

The last film the three Merchant Ivory principals made together was “Le Divorce” (2003), a contemporary story about Americans in Paris based on Diane Johnson’s novel. After Mr. Merchant’s death, Mrs. Jhabvala and Mr. Ivory worked together on “The City of Your Final Destination” (2009), another literary adaptation, of the Peter Cameron novel, set on an estate in Uruguay inhabited by Europeans, played by Laura Linney and Mr. Hopkins.

Holding dual British and American citizenship, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for her service to literature, in 1998.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughters, Renana Jhabvala, Firoza Jhabvala and Ava Jhabvala Wood; and six grandchildren.

In the end, Mrs. Jhabvala lived in New York longer than in any other place, but that didn’t mean she saw the city as home.

“Once a refugee, always a refugee,” she told The Guardian in 2005. “I can’t ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a screenwriter on “Maurice”; Kit Heskit-Harvey collaborated with the director James Ivory as screenwriters for that 1987 film, which was adapted from the E. M. Forster novel. It also referred incorrectly to school where she studied English literature. It is Queen Mary College, University of London, not St. Mary College.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 4, 2013, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Screenwriter, Dies at 85.