Trivia

In addition to their 40-year-long professional partnership, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were also longtime romantic partners.

At age 89, James Ivory became the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award on March 4, 2018 (Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name (2017)).

Directed 6 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Vanessa Redgrave, Denholm Elliott, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Hopkins. Thompson won an Oscar for Howards End (1992).

At age 89, James Ivory became the oldest winner of a competitive BAFTA on 18 Feb. 2018 (Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name (2017)).

In 2017, James Ivory announced his new feature film project Richard II, for which he has already a screenplay, a cast and locations. He has hoped to make this film since the early 90s.

On location, his partner and producer Ismail Merchant was renowned for his cooking and feeding of cast & crew, a practice often necessary in Merchant/Ivory's earlier low-budget days.

From 1965 to 2005, he & his producer Ismail Merchant enjoyed a collaboration that is probably unequaled in movie history for its success and consistency. In 1987, the pair's accomplishments were honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. premiere of Maurice (1987), attended by scores of their devotees, including Christopher Reeve, Sam Waterston, Greta Scacchi and even U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The National Portrait Gallery in London has paintings of Jim and his partners, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - even though they all live in New York City and none of them are English. (Ruth is German/Polish, Ismail is Indian, and James is American).

James Ivory and partner Ismail Merchant were awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for their films' "visual beauty, mature and intelligent themes, shrewd casting and superb acting". (February 24, 2002)

Earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon in 1951. He donated his personal papers to the university in 2003.

Graduated from USC School of Cinema-Television (1957) in Los Angeles, California.

Directed three features nominated for a 'Best Picture' Academy Award, all produced by Ismail Merchant: A Room with a View (1986), Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993). The three features also all earned nominations for James Ivory as 'Best Director' and for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as 'Best Adapted Screenplay'.

Received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 58. Pula Film Festival in Croatia 2011.

James Ivory's last feature film as a director was The City of Your Final Destination (2009), which he shot mostly in Argentina from Dec. 2006 to Jan. 2007.

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 50th Venice International Film Festival in 1993.

Biography: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985," pp. 458-465. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.