Ismail Merchant: The producer is generally the faceless partner in the process of filmmaking, working assiduously behind the scenes to raise the finance crucial in bringing projects to the screen, while the director takes the credit for the finished film. A notable exception was Ismail Merchant, who died in London on Wednesday at the age of 68.
As a producer, he became as well known as director James Ivory, with whom he worked in close collaboration for more than 40 years. Their films were known as Merchant-Ivory productions, a name that became synonymous with meticulously crafted period pictures and literary adaptations. Their films amassed 31 Oscar nominations, including three for best picture.
Merchant was born on Christmas Day in 1936, the only son among seven children, to a middle-class Muslim family in Bombay. When he was just nine, his politically active father arranged for Ismail to deliver a stirring speech dealing with the difficult issue of partition to a crowd of 10,000 Muslims.
He realised how he had moved and inflamed that audience and he later recalled: "Now once one of our films starts, it is like that crowd. There is no going back, no stopping." He returned to the stage at his Jesuit-run school, regularly appearing in variety shows, one of which was a benefit to fund his travels to New York University, where he took an MBA in business administration.
Working at the United Nations and with a New York advertising firm, he built up the contacts that would finance his first film, a 14-minute fusion of Indian dance, music and mythology in The Creation of Woman, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in 1961. It was narrated by the distinguished Indian actor, Saeed Jaffrey, as was, coincidentally, James Ivory's early short film, The Sword and the Flute, a documentary on Indian miniature painting.
Their paths crossed for the first time when Jaffrey invited Merchant to a New York screening of Ivory's film. A year later Merchant and Ivory were planning their first feature film, The Householder (1963), to be made in India from a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the author of the original novel.
A native of Cologne, whose family had fled Nazi Germany for England in 1939, she went on to write most of the subsequent feature films produced by Merchant and directed by Ivory, who came from an upper-class family in Berkeley, California.
Hailing from three continents, this cosmopolitan team specialised in films with a firm sense of place and period, a distinct feeling for landscape and for the people whose destinies were forged in clashes of class and cultures.
More often than not, the principal characters in Merchant-Ivory movies found themselves out of place and out of their depths in alien landscapes, strangers in strange lands, whether the location was Delhi or Bombay, London or Florence, New York or New England.
The Merchant-Ivory team followed The Householder with three more films made in India, the best of which was the allegorical Shakespeare Wallah (1965).
Literary adaptations dominated their prolific output, with sources from Jean Rhys (Quartet), Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), Henry James (The Europeans, The Bostonians, The Golden Bowl), and most famously, EM Forster (A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End), along with their breakthrough film to international audiences, Heat and Dust (1983), adapted by Prawer Jhabvala from her own Booker Prize novel.
Time and again, under Merchant's keen economic guidance and acumen, they achieved miracles on minuscule budgets at a time when the cost of Hollywood productions was soaring.
A Room with a View was made for $3.2 million, a remarkably low budget for a period picture with such high production values, and went on to take more than $65 million at the international box-office.
Consequently, Merchant and Ivory avoided the labyrinth of compromises that come hand in hand with mega-budget deals and remained one of the few truly independent teams working in world cinema.
Their personalities were polar opposites. Merchant was effortlessly friendly and charming, while Ivory was more reserved and prone to be testy.
For their casts and crews, one of the attractions of working on their films was the promise of fine Indian food cooked by Merchant himself, the author of two Indian cookbooks.
During the frenzy of the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, when Howards End was playing in competition there, Merchant invited a few dozen journalists to a sumptuous Indian lunch he insisted on preparing personally. En route to Cannes that year, Merchant and Ivory stopped over in Dublin to participate in a public interview with Irish Times readers, and as ever, Merchant regaled the audience with anecdotes about the film industry while Ivory dealt seriously with the creative process involved in their work.
Merchant was planning to direct a new film at the end of this year. The Goddess, a musical with Tina Turner cast as the Hindu mother goddess, Shakti. He had directed four feature films in his own right - In Custody, The Proprietor, Cotton Mary and The Mystic Masseur - although these were not as well received as the Ivory pictures he produced in the team's heyday.
They suffered a reversal of fortunes over the past 10 years, drawing poor notices and disappointing box-office returns with Ivory's films, Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso and Le Divorce.
Expectations are higher for Merchant's final film as a producer, The White Countess, set in 1930s Shanghai, written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Ivory, and with a strong cast led by Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave.
To be released at the end of the year, it is the third Merchant Ivory production to feature Redgrave, who once observed: "There is no equivalent to them and what they do."
Ismail Merchant: born December 25th, 1936; died May 25th, 2005